Lynn Jones

• fsu.academia.edu/LynnJones

Dr. Lynn Jones specializes in the medieval East: the Empire of Byzantium, the kingdoms of Armenia and Georgia and the Islamic Caliphates. Issues of medieval identity have informed much of her work. Her first book, Between Islam and Byzantium: Aght`amar and the Visual Construction of Medieval Armenian Rulership (2007), covers a period (885-1100 CE) when Armenia was a vassal state of the Abbasid Caliphate and a buffer zone between the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate. In it she demonstrates that the Armenian visual expression of power was modeled on the Abbasid paradigm, while the visual expression of Armenian piety reflected a specifically Armenian Orthodox view, eschewing all links with Byzantium and Greek Orthdoxy.

As a scholar, Dr. Jones is most interested in questions of identity in Byzantium and the kingdoms of the medieval Caucasus. This has motivated much of her work, whether it be on the Church of the Holy Cross at Aghtamar (Between Islam and Byzantium. The Church of the Holy Cross at Aght’amar and the Visual Expression of Rulership, Routledge 2007), or the identity of Byzantine relics of the True Cross once they left the Empire (see CV for multiple articles and chapters). She has spent summers working in Cappadocia with a changing cast of graduate students, as well as years of work on her own. These studies have proven fruitful and are the subject of her latest book, Defining the Imperial in Middle Byzantine Cappadocian Art, 843-1204, to be published in 2027 in Palgrave Macmillan’s new series, New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture.

She is editor of, and contributed to, a festschrift, Byzantine Images and Their Afterlives: Essays in Honor of Annmarie Weyl Carr (Ashgate Publishing, 2014). The concepts linking the 12 papers written for the volume include the examination of form and meaning, the relationship between original and copy and reception and cultural identity in medieval art and architecture. She is also co-editor, with Brad Hostetler, Assistant Professor, Kenyon College (FSU PhD 2016) of A Handbook of Byzantine Material Culture, a forthcoming volume in Routledge’s Material Culture Series.