Assistant Professor, Undergraduate Director for Art History.
Cecily Hilsdale specializes in the arts of Byzantium and the wider Mediterranean world. Her research focuses on diplomacy and cultural exchange, in particular the circulation of Byzantine luxury items as diplomatic gifts as well as the related dissemination of eastern styles, techniques, iconographies and ideologies of imperium. Other academic interests include the intersection of ritual and representation, gender and patronage, image theory, as well as the art and architecture of medieval Spain. Professor Hilsdale’s research has received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, and the Fulbright Foundation.
Course offerings
In addition to undergraduate surveys of ancient and medieval art and architecture, Professor Hilsdale offers more specialized courses on such topics as Art and Crusade, the Arts of Medieval Spain, the Medieval City: Constantinople, and Medieval Pilgrimage: Creating Sacred Landscapes. Recentgraduate seminars include the Advanced Pro-Seminar, Istanbul Imagined, The Medieval Gift: Anthropological Theory and Art Historical Practice, MedievalEncounters with Islam, and Visual Cultures of the Medieval Mediterranean.
Select publications:
“Gift,” forthcoming in Medieval Art History Today – Critical Terms, a Special Issue of Studies in Iconography 33 (2012).
“The Imperial Image at the End of Exile: The Byzantine Embroidered Silk in Genoa and the Treaty of Nymphaion (1261),” in press in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 64 (2010), 1-48.
“The Social Life of the Byzantine Gift: The Royal Crown of Hungary Re-Invented,” Art History 31/5 (2008), 602-31.
“Constructing a Byzantine Augusta: A Greek Book for a French Bride,” Art Bulletin 87/3 (2005), 458-83.
“Towards a Social History of Art: Defining ‘Mozarabic,’” Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture in Confluence and Dialogue 5/3 (1999), 272-89.
