“Reconfiguring Constantinople: Story Spaces & Storied Imperial Places in the Madrid Skylitzes MSS”
Speaker: Elena Boeck, Associate Professor of Art History, DePaul University
Elena N. Boeck (Ph.D., Yale) is an associate professor of Art History at DePaul University and specializes in the arts of the medieval Mediterranean world. She has just completed a book that investigates the rise of illustrated histories in the Mediterranean world from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries and explores the ideological motivations for visualizing Byzantine history in Sicily and Bulgaria. The next project, Icons of Empire, explores the intersection of Orthodox piety, imperial imagery, and the invention of tradition in Marian icons of the Russian Empire.
Research Interests: Medieval Mediterranean Art and Architecture, Byzantine Illustrated Manuscripts, Visual Literacy, Post-Byzantine Icons and Print Culture.
Her recent publications include:
• “Believing is Seeing: Princess Spotting in St. Sofia of Kiev,” in Brian J. Boeck, Russell E. Martin, and Daniel Rowland, eds., Dubitando: Studies in History and Culture in Honor of Donald Ostrowski (Slavica, 2012): 167-79
• “Claiming and Acclaiming Peter the Great: Ukrainian Contributions to the Visual Commemoration of Petrine Victories,” in Serhii Plokhy, ed., Poltava 1709: The Battle and the Myth (Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies, 2012): 271-308
• “Strength in Numbers or Unity in Diversity? Compilations of Miracle-Working Virgin Icons,” in Jefferson J.A. Gatrall and Douglas Greenfield, eds., Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010): 27-49
• “Engaging the Byzantine past: strategies of visualizing history in Sicily and Bulgaria,” in Ruth Macrides, ed., Byzantine History as Literature. Papers from the Fortieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, April 2007 (Ashgate Publishing, 2010): 215-235
• “Simulating the Hippodrome: Expertise, Appropriation and the Performance of Power in St. Sophia of Kiev,” The Art Bulletin 91/3 (2009): 283-301
• “The politics of visualizing an imperial demise: transforming a Byzantine chronicle into a Sicilian visual narrative,” Word & Image 25/3 (2009): 243-257
• “Un-Orthodox Imagery: Voids and Visual Narrative in the Madrid Skylitzes Manuscript,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies vol. 33, no. 1 (2009): 17-41
• “Displacing Byzantium, Disgracing Convention: The Manuscript Patronage of Tsar Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria,” Manuscripta: A Journal for Manuscript Research 51/2 (2007): 181-208