The Committee
on the History
of Culture

Faculty

Robert S. Nelson
Office: 250 Cochrane-Woods Art Center
Phone: 773.702.0250
E-mail: olin@uchicago.edu

________________

University of Chicago
Humanities Division

Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Art History, the Committees on the Ancient Mediterranean World and Visual Arts, and the College; Chair of the Committee on the History of Culture; Associate Faculty in the Divinity School

Ph.D. (New York University)

Robert Nelson works in two interrelated areas. The first concerns the artistic interaction in the central and eastern Mediterranean during the Middle Ages and recently has included studies of the semiotics of writing and ornament; politically symbolic religious narratives; and culturally constructed notions of vision, as described in the edited volume, Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge University Press, 2000). A second interest is the history of the study and reception of these cultures to the present and theories of art history. Here the most recent publications are Hagia Sophia 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument (University of Chicago Press, 2004), and the co-edited volumes, Monuments and Memory Made and Unmade (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Critical Terms for Art History (University of Chicago Press, 2nd edition 2003).

 

University of Chicago || Humanities Division || Committee on the History of Culture