Associate Professor of History of Art
About
Paroma Chatterjee’s area of specialization is Byzantium and its intersection with the Mediterranean world. Her work explores late antique and medieval image theories, cross-cultural networks, icons, relics, hagiography, word-image relations (particularly ekphrasis), and the reception of antiquity in Byzantium. A faculty member of the program on the Mediterranean Perspective on Global History and Culture, and of MEMS (Medieval and Early Modern Studies), Chatterjee contributes courses on the intersections of Byzantine and western medieval art, and the medieval Mediterranean. Her research has been supported, among others, by the Italian Academy at Columbia University, a Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellowship, a Samuel H. Kress fellowship, and most recently, an invited full-faculty fellowship at the Max Weber Kolleg at Erfurt, Germany.
Chatterjee’s first book, The Living Icon in Byzantium and Italy (Cambridge, 2014) explored the significance of the so-called ‘vita’ icon in Byzantium and among the Franciscans. It argued that the format was a means of thinking through the fraught conceptual and material relationships between images and relics, matter and form, and human versus divine agency. Chatterjee has also published essays on related topics in the Art Bulletin, Art History, Gesta, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, RES, and Word & Image, among others, and in edited volumes.
Teaching interests
Chatterjee teaches a broad range of courses on Byzantium and the medieval Mediterranean. Her undergraduate lectures and seminars cover diverse media with a focus on the precarious boundaries between sacred and secular art, imperial imagery, and the spatial relationships defining viewer experience in the period. Undergraduate classes regularly visit Special Collections, the Kelsey Museum, and the Museum of Art. She also offers a graduate seminar on Iconoclasm which explores that problematic concept from late antiquity up to the eleventh century. All her courses pivot on close reading, and attempting to ask (and sometimes answer) fundamental questions regarding the prevalence, functions, and import of images in the premodern world.
Current research
Chatterjee’s second book (tentatively titled Set in Stone) examines the rich corpus of non-Christian statuary in Constantinople, most of which was destroyed in the Fourth Crusade, but which is mentioned with some regularity across a range of literary genres from the 4th to the 13th centuries CE, and even beyond. The broad argument informing the book is that this corpus carved out an equally important (and understudied) cosmic trajectory for the Eastern Roman empire as the many churches that dotted its capital city. Chatterjee has presented this research at several venues, including most recently at the Universities of Oxford (UK), Aarhus (Denmark), Erfurt (Germany) and Edinburgh (UK).
Selected publications:
“City of Prophecies: Constantinople and its pagan statues,” (invited and peer-reviewed, De Gruyter Publications).
“Iconoclasm’s Legacy: Reinterpreting the Trier Ivory,” (The Art Bulletin, forthcoming fall 2018).
“Charisma and the Ideal Viewer in Nicetas Choniates’ De Signis,” in The Faces of Charisma. Text, Image, Object in Byzantium and the Medieval West, eds. Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak and Martha Dana Rust (Brill: Leiden, 2018), 237-60.
“Viewing in eighth-century Constantinople,” Gesta 56:2 (Fall 2017): 137-49.
“Ancient Statues, Christian City: Constantinople and the Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai,” in Old Society, New Belief. Religious Transformation of China and Rome, ca. 1st-6th centuries, eds. Mu-chou Poo H.A. Drake, and Lisa Raphals (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2017) 203-16.
