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Biography

As a faculty member in the Department of Art and Archaeology, I teach a range of courses related to Museum Studies and Global Premodern Art History. My classes broadly engage with issues of museum ethics and environmental studies as well as the art and material culture of Afro-Eurasian faith traditions. I also coordinate the Humanities Council, which invites international scholars, makers, and practitioners to share their work on campus through our Humanities Colloquium. 

As a medieval art historian by training, my research centers on issues of community identity, memory, and materiality in Mediterranean contact regions. I am currently completing my book manuscript, “‘One Whose Name was Writ in Wax’: The Medieval Reuse of Consular Diptychs,” which focuses on the connection between early Christian liturgical rites and the medieval reuse of late antique ivory diptychs. My new book project, “Reuse, Unspoiled: Ivory Sculpture in Medieval Afro-Eurasia,” examines the long histories and itineracy of treasury objects made from Asian and African elephant ivory. In addition to framing the idea of “reuse” as an important corrective to scholarly concepts like “spolia” and “recycling,” I also consider how the demand for ivory during the Middle Ages contributed to the destruction of species, the dissolution of communities, and the death and enslavement of people. 

Prior to joining the faculty at 91��Ƶר�� College, I was a postdoctoral Robert M. Kingdon Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at The University of Wisconsin-Madison (2022-2023). I also served as the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Research/Collections Specialist Fellow and was a member of the Medieval Ivory Research Project in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2020-2022). With the support of predoctoral fellowships from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, I was in residence at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (Central Institute for Art History) in Munich (2016-2020). 

Research Interests 

Late antique and medieval art, material culture, histories of craft and making, museum history, museum ethics, ecocritical art history 

Catharina Blänsdorf, Nicole D. Pulichene und Esther Wipfler