Alumnus Dr. Brad Hostetler to Speak on Byzantine Relics as Weapons, Monday 11/19

Dr. Brad Hostetler (PhD 2016) returns to Florida State University on Monday, November 19 to deliver a public lecture, “Relics as Weapons in Byzantine Military Culture.”  Dr. Hostetler is visiting assistant professor in the Department of Art History at Kenyon College in Gambier, OH. His research interests include the interaction of text and image, Greek epigraphy, and the agency of objects in Late Antiquity and Byzantium.

Dr. Hostetler’s current book project, Enshrining Sacred Matter: The Form, Function, and Meaning of Reliquaries in Medieval Byzantium, re-contextualizes how reliquaries were used when Constantinople was regarded as the relic capital of the Christian world. He examines the production and circulation of reliquaries in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the ways in which they were carried, worn, and handled in ecclesiastical settings, imperial ceremonial, and the domestic sphere. He has published essays on this topic in the journals Eastern Christian Art and Athanor, and in the anthology Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500–1500 (Routledge, 2017).

Professor Hostetler is also co-director of Inscriptions of Mount Athos (IMA), a project that analyzes the medieval Greek inscriptions preserved at the monasteries of Mount Athos, Greece. Other current projects include investigations of a signet ring at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a medieval ekphrasis describing hippodrome activities in Constantinople, and the funerary monuments at the Chora Museum. Professor Hostetler has previously held fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Prior to joining the faculty at Kenyon, he taught courses on medieval pilgrimage, the True Cross, and Late Antique and Early Christian art and architecture at Florida State University.