Archaeologist & Historian of Art and Architecture
Research Interests: medieval architecture, medieval archaeology, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Burgundy and Flanders, gender, medieval spirituality, landscapes, patronage, reuse, and theories of space and place
Research: My research examines the intersection of architecture, sensory experience, class, gendered bodies, and the augmentation and representation of experiences within the mind. My book project, Designing Gendered Seclusion: Staging Access to the Divine in Late Medieval Burgundy and Early Modern Flanders, focuses on the duchy of Burgundy after the union of Margaret of Flanders (1350-1405) and Philip the Bold (1342-1400) to explore how three connected oratories elicit distinct sensorial experiences, and how these differences are motivated by their specific physical and social contexts. To fully understand the complex relationships between landscape, building, and the plastic depiction of space, as well as Margaret’s role in their creation, my interpretation of this data draws on theoretical discussions on medieval concepts of matter, affective prayer, sacred space, sensory taxonomies, landscape and the environment, the construction and performance of gender, and the creation of otherness. My second book project examines oratories as a holistic trend, reuniting philosophies and technologies of accessing the divine and depictions of that access that, I argue, would have been understood in their time as overlapping within the broader trend of affective prayer. This period of study extends from the fourth century into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and incorporates structures from throughout Europe, including case studies surveyed during my studies in Ireland and my Fulbright-funded research in France and Belgium.