About

Roland Betancourt is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art (2024-2026) and holds the distinction of Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine. He is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and has held prestigious fellowships including the Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2016-2017) and a Chancellor’s Fellowship at UCI (2019-2022). His research primarily focuses on the Byzantine Empire, exploring its art, liturgy, and theology. Betancourt has authored four monographs that delve into various aspects of Byzantine history and culture, including secrecy, intersectionality, and sensory experience in Byzantine art and liturgy. His work has been recognized with awards such as the Jerome E. Singerman Book Prize from the Medieval Academy of America and a finalist position for the Award of Excellence in the Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion. In addition to his scholarly publications, Betancourt serves as editor for the ICMA | Viewpoints book series at Pennsylvania State University Press and The Middle Ages book series at the University of Pennsylvania Press. He has contributed to the governance of several professional organizations including the College Art Association, the International Center of Medieval Art, the Byzantine Studies Association of North America, the Medievalists of Color organization, and the Medieval Academy of America. His popular writing on medieval topics has appeared in major outlets such as The Washington Post, Scientific American, TIME, and The Advocate. Betancourt's teaching excellence has been recognized with a UCI School of Humanities Faculty Teaching Award. Beyond his focus on the Middle Ages, Betancourt is interested in the history of space, technology, and labor, subjects he explores in his forthcoming book Disneyland and the Rise of Automation (Princeton University Press, 2026). He is also completing a project on the representation of Byzantium in American art, literature, and popular media from the 1950s to the present. His interdisciplinary approach bridges art history, history, theology, and cultural studies, contributing significant insights into both medieval and modern cultural phenomena.

Research topics

• Sociology
• History
• Ancient history
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• Classics
• Philosophy
• Literature
• Acoustics
• Art
• Visual arts
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Reading Gender Variance

  2024-05-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter serves as an introduction to the state of the field in medieval trans studies at large, demonstrating the critical contribution that this area of research can offer Byzantine studies and its approaches to gender and sexuality. It uses the first-century BCE text of Diodorus Siculus on intersex persons and its transmission in the collections of Photios’s Bibliotheca and Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos’s Excerpts to train the reader on the way to undertake a ‘trans-affirming reading’ of such narratives. The goal here is to demonstrate how an understanding of trans and queer history allows one to recognise patterns of erasure and representation, which are often invisible to cisgender, heterosexual historical methods. The intention is to cultivate a trans/queer sensibility to these texts in order to recognise, articulate, and contextualise the evidence they offer for the history of premodern gender variance.

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• Introduction: Medieval Studies and Its Institutions

  Speculum · 2024-12-16

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Concluding Roundtable: Crisis and Optimism

  Speculum · 2024-12-16

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• 9 Icon, Eucharist, Relic: Negotiating the Division of Sacred Matter in Byzantium

  2024-05-21 · 2 citations

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• Automata, Kineticism, and Automation

  Reinterpreting the Middle Ages · 2023-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  [Abstract, Looking at the intersecting trajectories of Kineticism and Performance art, this chapter explores the interest in animacy that permeated art and popular culture during the long 1960s through the lens of a growing interest at the time in medieval automata. By studying the culture of the time broadly, it is possible to understand how this fascination with animation came at the moment that marked the rise in industrial automation and spaces of mass spectacle that were themselves automated for the safe and efficient movement of peoples. By studying the aestheticization of automation and animacy through the lens of medieval art and historiography, the chapter offers this period of late modern art an understanding of animacy that captures the holistic environments of the work of art and how these spaces became ritualized, participatory, and led by various practices of performance.]

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• FOREWORD

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2023-01-09

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• From Plane to Space: The Narrative Arc of a Byzantine Mathematical Manual

  2023-08-31

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• Reflections on a Latinx Decolonial Praxis for Medievalists

  2023-10-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Weaving together personal and historiographic reflection, this chapter proposes ways of approaching the study of the Middle Ages from a decolonial praxis. The author contemplates not only his own experiences in the field but also how various areas of his work have been uniquely informed by his subjectivity as a queer Latinx scholar wishing to subvert art historical canons and the violence of our knowledge making, as well as to propose new forms of art historical work on the Middle Ages that is informed by contemporary thought and theorizations of identity. In the process, the chapter also surveys the work being done in Medieval Studies that engages with and contributes to Critical Race Studies, Indigenous Studies, and decolonization.

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• Between Wonder and Omen: Conjoined Twins and the Mandylion from Constantinople to Norman Sicily

  Gesta · 2023-03-01 · 13 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the year 944, two wonders arrived in Constantinople from the eastern borders of the empire: First, the Mandylion, a textile that Christ had miraculously imprinted with an image of his face, was brought to the city from Edessa. Second, to the awe of the city’s inhabitants, male conjoined twins arrived from Armenia. In this article, I focus on the depiction of both events in the Madrid Skylitzes historical chronicle (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS vitr. 26–2). My goal is to show how the multifaceted meanings of the conjoined twins and the Mandylion operated in the context of imperial rule, political intrigue, and religious authority, from the text’s origin in Constantinople to the manuscript’s illumination in Norman Sicily.

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• From Plane to Space: The Narrative Arc of a Byzantine Mathematical Manual

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2023-09-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The <i>Geodesia</i> is a Byzantine mathematical treatise intended as an appendix to a guide on siege warfare. Looking at the use of diagrammatic illustrations in the manuscript (BAV, Vat. gr. 1605), this article argues that the progression from two-dimensional drawings onto three-dimensional representations follows the “narrative arc” of the text from abstract mathematics to their application for siegecraft.

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Frequent coauthors

• Louise Doyle '

  Wesleyan University

  25 shared

• Brigitte Buettner

  25 shared

• Joseph Salvatore Ackley

  Wesleyan University

  25 shared

• Karla Mallette

  2 shared

• Maria Taroutina

  2 shared

• Stewart Brookes

  1 shared

• Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

  Thoth Open Metadata

  1 shared

• Catherine E. Karkov

  University of Leeds

  1 shared

Education

• B.A., History of Art, and Anthropology

  University of Pennsylvania

• M.A., History of Art

  Yale University

• Other, History of Art

  Yale University

• Ph.D., History of Art

  Yale University

  2014

Awards & honors

• Andrew W. Mellon Professor, The Center for Advanced Study in…
• Guggenheim Fellow, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation…
• Chancellor's Fellow, UC, Irvine (2019-2022)
• Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow, Institute for A…
• UCI School of Humanities Faculty Teaching Award (2016)