Contemporary Authors

PERSONAL

Female.

Bryn Mawr, graduated, 1984; New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, Ph.D., 1993.

ADDRESS

• Office - University of California-Los Angeles, Dodd Hall 200C, 405 Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90095-1417

CAREER

Art historian and professor. University of Maryland, associate professor of Byzantine art and archaeology; University of California, Los Angeles, professor of Byzantine art and archaeology in the Department of Art History.

UCLA, Transdisciplinary Seed Grant, Faculty Research Grant; Dumbarton Oaks Project Grant, Foundation Fellowship; J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship; Kress Fellowship; Robert Lehman Fellowship; Gennadius Fellowship; Arts Initiative Grant; J. Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2011-2012); Anglo-Hellenic League, Runciman Prize, 2016, for Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium.

WRITINGS

• Beholding the Sacred Mysteries: Programs of the Byzantine Sanctuary, University of Washington Press (Seattle, WA), 1999
• (Editor, with Julie Lauffenburger) A Lost Art Rediscovered: The Architectural Ceramics of Byzantium, Penn State University Press (University Park, PA), 2001
• (Editor) Thresholds of the Sacred: Architectural, Art Historical, Liturgical, and Theological Perspectives on Religious Screens, East and West, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (Washington, DC), 2007
• (Editor, with Robert S. Nelson) Approaching the Holy Mountain: Art and Liturgy at St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, Brepols Publishers (Turnhout, Belgium), 2010
• (Editor) Viewing the Morea: Land and People in the Late Medieval Peloponnese, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (Washington, DC), 2013
• Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium: Art, Archaeology, and Ethnography, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2016
• Viewing Greece: Cultural and Political Agency in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean, Brepols Publishers (Turnhout, Belgium), 2016

Contributor of academic articles to professional journals, including Hesperia, Journal of the Walters Art Museum, Art Bulletin, Deltion tes Christianikes Archaiologikes Hetaireieas, and Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte.

SIDELIGHTS

Award-winning art historian and professor Sharon E. J. Gerstel graduated from Bryn Mawr and received her Ph.D. from New York University in 1993. Her work focuses on the intersection of ritual and art in Byzantium and the Latin East, and she has written and edited numerous books on Byzantine art and architecture. She also serves on the editorial boards of the journals Hesperia, Gesta, Viator, and Zograf and of the series “Studies in the Visual Culture of the Middle Ages.” She has published academic papers on the medieval village of Panakton, ceramic tiles produced in Nicomedia, and Byzantine women, empresses, widows, and nuns. Gerstel is professor of Byzantine art and archaeology in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was awarded a J. Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011. As a working archaeologist, Gerstel has participated as a field director and ceramics specialist in various excavations in Greece. She is also codirector, together with Chris Kyriakakis, of the project “Bodies and Spirits: Soundscapes of Byzantium,” which has been featured on Atlantic.com and on CBC radio.

In 1999, Gerstel published Beholding the Sacred Mysteries: Programs of the Byzantine Sanctuary, in which she analyzes the Byzantine sanctuary through written and painted sources. Some paintings in the sanctuaries were made for public view, but a curtain obscured many fine works that were for the specific private use of the priests. Consequently, Gerstel explores various contexts of the artwork from the perspective of the monks, liturgical celebrants, bishops, lay people, and contemporary viewers. Gerstel also considers monuments and decorated churches from the Byzantine capital of Macedonia between 1028 and 1328 in a region now spanning Greece, Bulgaria, and the former Yugoslavia. These monuments demonstrate how Christian iconography was influenced by painters and churches over time.

In 2001, Gerstel partnered with Julie A. Lauffenburger, senior objects conservator at the Walters Art Museum, to edit A Lost Art Rediscovered: The Architectural Ceramics of Byzantium. Contributors provide essays on the impressive and colorful ceramic tiles arranged in ornamental patterns on Byzantine buildings during the tenth and eleventh centuries. The book catalogs the known remaining sources of the polychrome revetment tiles that were produced around Constantinople, including the collection at the Walters Art Museum and artwork belonging to museums and private collections around the world.

Gerstel next edited the 2007 Thresholds of the Sacred: Architectural, Art Historical, Liturgical, and Theological Perspectives on Religious Screens, East and West, with coeditor Nicholas Constas, formerly associate professor at the Harvard Divinity School and now a monk at the Simonopetra Monastery in Mt. Athos, Greece. The book, which draws from papers presented at the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Studies symposium, collects essays about artistic religious screens used to separate religious space in communities and religious buildings and about the thresholds that they separate. Screens from the Middle Ages and Renaissance in the East and West are described in relation to the barriers they created between sanctuary, choir, nave, priest, laity, men, and women.

In 201o, Gerstel joined with coeditor Robert S. Nelson, Robert Lehman Professor of History of Art at Yale University, to publish Approaching the Holy Mountain: Art and Liturgy at St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. The book collects nineteen essays that discuss the longest continuously inhabited Christian monastery, located in the Sinai desert. Since the Middle Ages, St. Catherine’s monastery was known from Egypt to the Holy Land, attracting pilgrims, monks, artists, builders, and scholars. The monastery is also home to the largest collection of Byzantine icons in the world, which have been exhibited in Athens, London, St. Petersburg, and New York. The book’s contributors discuss icons from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries, interpret their meaning and provenance, explore Byzantine manuscripts in the monastery’s library, present pilgrims’ accounts of their visits to the monastery, and describe a recently excavated early church on the summit of Mt. Sinai.

Gerstel collected fourteen essays on late medieval Morea (Peloponnese) for her 2013 book Viewing the Morea: Land and People in the Late Medieval Peloponnese. The essays describe how in medieval times, western Crusader knights attempted to establish a kingdom in the Morea region in order to create an eternal and sacred empire. At the time, many Orthodox villagers shared the region with the indigenous people and created their own futures and identity. The essays tell of hopes and loss, how various ethnic groups interacted, how they established a sense of identity, their economic achievements, the architectural and cartographic markings of the mountains and valleys in the region, the creation of place and memory, the recreation of city life and Renaissance culture, and cultural myths.

In 2016, Gerstel edited Viewing Greece: Cultural and Political Agency in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean, part of the “Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages” series. The book draws on information presented at conferences, workshops, and lectures associated with the Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections exhibition held at the National Gallery of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, and Art Institute of Chicago from 2013 to 2015. Gerstel collects thirteen essays describing the art, architecture, and topography of medieval and early modern Greece. Papers from academics, curators, and critics describe the culture, politics, trade, religion, and architecture in the late antique world, the Byzantine Empire, and the early modern Mediterranean.

Gerstel’s next book is the 2016 Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium: Art, Archaeology, and Ethnography, in which she describes the Late Byzantine (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) village through written, archaeological, and artistic sources. She places the Byzantine peasantry in context in the setting of the medieval village in Mediterranean history. The village was a microcosm of social and economic hierarchies consisting of farmers, mothers, priests, millers, witches, and other players in the society. In her research, Gerstel uses writings of early travelers, ethnographers, anthropologists, archaeologists, and art historians of the time. Writing in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, M. Rautman called the book a “pioneering, wide-ranging exploration” of the late Byzantium era and noted: “Thoroughly researched, sympathetically written, and extensively illustrated, this book offers an accessible introduction to a little-known medieval world.” Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium received the 2016 Runciman Prize, given by the Anglo-Hellenic League.

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

• Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, April, 2016, M. Rautman, review of Rural Lives and Landscapes in Late Byzantium: Art, Archaeology, and Ethnography, p. 1228.

ONLINE

• University of California-Los Angeles, Department of Art History Web site, http://arthistory.ucla.edu/ (March 28, 2017), author faculty profile.

• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Web site, http://www.gf.org/ (March 28, 2017), author profile.