Stephen Clancy

My primary teaching areas are the art and architecture of the Middle Ages, and the painting, sculpture, and graphic arts of the Northern Renaissance. Also, at the 100-level I share teaching "Introduction to Visual Culture."  Rather than focusing on jargonistic visual-culture theory, this course looks at how we "see" images, and the ways in which images powerfully impact our lives on a daily basis, serving as powerful tools of manipulation and social control. At the 200-level, my courses provide a survey Medieval architecture ("Architecture from Catacombs to Cathedrals"), explore different facets of medieval life as revealed through the visual and material culture of the Middle Ages ("Introduction to the Medieval World"), and investigate images that embody new ideas about religion, social structure, and the role of the artist in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Northern Europe ("Northern Renaissance Art"). At the 300-level I've taught courses on "The Visionary Art of Bosch and Bruegel," and "The Age of Chivalry"; recently I created a cross-cultural course entitled "Muslims, Jews, and Christians in Medieval Spain," which explores the rich cultural interactions that took place on the Iberian peninsula during the Middle Ages, and their implications for the modern era. Seminars I've taught at the 400-level include "The Medieval City," "The Gothic Cathedral," and "The Illuminated Manuscript."

My eclectic research interests have seen me delving into manuscript illumination connected to two fifteenth-century French artists: Jean Fouquet, whose career was centered in the Loire Valley region of France, and Simon Marmion, who was born in Amiens, and who appears to have collaborated on projects with a number of artists centered in Flanders. I've also explored the relationship between images of warrior saints and militant Byzantine emperors in Middle Byzantine icons and manuscripts illumination. Most recently I've become immersed in a humanities technology project entitled "Virtual Chartres Cathedral," which seeks to erase the barriers between students and the 21st-century cathedral and town, by providing a digital "bridge" by which they can explore and interact with the cathedral and its surroundings; and to immerse students in a hypothetical 13th-century reconstruction of the cathedral and town. This year I will be completely revamping the project's online presence, updating it to "Chartres 2.0," as a colleague put it!  I hope to give students a chance to work with me on integrating class-based knowledge with practical ways of experiencing architecture and history virtually.

And I've discovered a wonderful perk of being an art historian: regularly acting as a Study Leader on tours organized by the American Museum of Natural History ("AMNH Expeditions"). Most recently, I served as Study Leader on AMNH's "Family Greece" expedition, and have also acted as a lecturer on trips to Sicily, the Italian mainland, Malta, Turkey, and southern France.