Art History alumnus Brad Hostetler (PhD 2016) will join the faculty at Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio) as Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History this fall, teaching undergraduate surveys and a seminar on Byzantine art. Brad is particularly excited to work within a robust art history program that includes five permanent faculty members, at an institution that stresses excellence in both teaching and research.
Brad will continue his work on relationships between text and image, and the function of reliquaries in the Byzantine Empire. These interests grew out of his coursework at FSU, where faculty encouraged him to seek out interdisciplinary approaches to the study of objects and primary sources. His dissertation, “The Function of Text: Byzantine reliquaries with epigrams, 843–1204,” was written under the direction of Prof. Lynn Jones.
He is now developing this research into two book projects. The first, Enshrining Sacred Matter: The Form, Function, and Meaning of Reliquaries in Medieval Byzantium, 843–1204, re-contextualizes the use of reliquaries in a period when Constantinople was regarded as the relic capital of the Christian world. His second project, Inscriptions of Mount Athos, co-directed with a colleague at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, documents the medieval Greek inscriptions on minor works of art preserved in the monastic collections of Mount Athos, Greece. The project’s website, www.athosinscriptions.org, will go live on August 28, 2017.
Brad’s research has been supported by two prestigious fellowships. While finishing his dissertation, he was a Junior Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC (2015–16). This past academic year, he was a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow in the department of Medieval Art and the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2016–17).
Brad’s work can be found on his website, www.bradhostetler.com.