In light of an all too familiar racist, transphobic, and xenophobic rhetoric rising in the United States in advance of the 2016 presidential election, I was compelled to finally write this project that had been ruminating in my mind.
Roland Betancourt
Roland Betancourt is Professor of Art History and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. He received his PhD in the History of Art from Yale University in 2014. In 2016 to 2017, he was the Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Professor Betancourt’s research focuses on the visual culture of the Byzantine Empire. His work has looked at the role of Byzantine art in modern and contemporary art and popular culture. Betancourt’s first monograph, Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2018), proposes a new understanding of theories of vision in the ancient Greek and Byzantine worlds by distancing sight from touch and placing a central focus on the workings of the imagination. He is also the author of a forthcoming book, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), and another book entitled Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy (Cambridge University Press, 2021).