Dustin Aaron is Assistant Professor in the Theory and History of Art and Design at the Rhode Island School of Design and a historian of the art and architecture of the European Middle Ages. His recent publications concern the role of monumental sculpture in medieval colonization, the place of hermits in European conceptions of wilderness, and the relationship between landscapes and memory. Many of these themes coalesce in his forthcoming book, Crafting Wilderness: The Art of Medieval Colonization.
Thomas Arentzen is PhD and Docent in Church History from Lund University. He works as Senior Lecturer at Sankt Ignatios College, Stockholm School of Eastern Christian Studies. In 2016, Arentzen spent a semester at Brown as a postdoc, and in 2018–2019 he was Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks. Having specialized in the field of late ancient poetry, Arentzen now devotes most of his research time to ecology and more-than-human species in Christian tradition. His recent publications include the monographs Byzantine Tree Life (co-written with Virginia Burrus & Glenn Peers; Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and The Gospel of Trees (Cascade, 2026), the translation/edition Romanos the Melodist: Songs about Women (DOML 83, Harvard University Press, 2024), as well as the edited volume Ecologizing Late Ancient and Byzantine Worlds (with Laura Borghetti; Bloomsbury, 2025).
Ellen F. Arnold is a medieval environmental historian with a focus on religion and water. She is currently Senior Lecturer of History at The Ohio State University, USA, and previously held positions at the University of Stavaner in Norway and Ohio Wesleyan University. She is long-time co-editor of the journal Water History, and editor-elect for Environmental History. Her research has focused on cultural and religious understandings of nature and water. She is the author of three books: Medieval Riverscapes (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Negotiating the Landscape (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), and Water in World History (Routledge, 2025).
Robyn Barrow is an art historian of medieval Europe in a connected world. She specializes in art, cultural exchange and environmental histories of Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. Her region of study encounters the sovereign homelands of the Inuit and Sámi, and she has traveled extensively in the Arctic. Her manuscript, Tracking North: Art, Ecology and Exchange in the Medieval Nordic World explores cultural systems extending across the vast spaces of the north. The project illuminates the ways that systems of secular and religious power were creatively negotiated by communities across the wide Norse-settled region in the Middle Ages, from Gotland to Greenland. Her second project considers the relationship between medieval art and the temporalities of contemporary environmental crisis.
Her research has been supported by major institutions including the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts; a collaborative initiative between the Fulbright Foundation and National Science Foundation for Arctic Research; and the Swedish Institute. Her published work has appeared in major journals such as The Medieval Globe and Different Visions.
Sheila Bonde’s research combines architectural history, archival research, archaeology and social anthropological approaches to study medieval built and non-built spaces. She has directed excavations on five monastic sites, and has engaged not only with the architecture of the church, but with the domestic and industrial buildings within the complexes, and aspects of the landscape (such as hydraulics). She is interested in the ways in which texts, buildings, pottery, pipes and bones sometimes tell conflicting stories. Professor Bonde has been involved with a number of digital projects, including her website on Saint-Jean-des-Vignes and her recent digital article on the construction process at the abbey of Ourscamp.
Sarah M. Guérin is Associate Professor of Medieval Art in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research centres on materials and materiality, with an accent on the socio-economic structures which inflect production and use, as well as the symbolic and affective potential of materials. Her first monograph, French Gothic Ivories: Material Theologies and the Sculptor’s Craft (2022), was awarded the John Nicholas Brown prize from the Medieval Academy of America. Her many publications on the medieval ivory trade link West African economics with those of the Mediterranean world. This expertise led to her inclusion on the steering committee for the award-winning exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa (2019). Guérin’s longstanding interest in trans-Saharan trade, where economics is deeply inflected by the environment, similarly informs her current book project Goldrush 1270: Paris, Florence, Tunis, Ni-Jimi.
Natasha Heller teaches Chinese Religion in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Illusory Abiding: The Cultural Construction of the Chan Monk Zhongfeng Mingben (2014) and Literature for Little Bodhisattvas: Making Buddhist Families in Modern Taiwan (2025). Her current research sits at the intersection of plant humanities and religious studies, with a special interest in trees in Chinese Buddhism, and she is writing a cultural, religious, and environmental history of Alishan, Taiwan.
Whitney Kite is an assistant professor of Art History and Architectural Studies at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. She received her PhD in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University, with a focus on the art and architectural history of the medieval world, primarily in the areas of West Asia and the Mediterranean. Her research explores the intersection of artistic and environmental histories in through the lens of phenomenology, theology, political economy, and ecocriticism. Her ongoing projects situates medieval Armenian monasteries in their local landscapes, demonstrating the significance of specific topographic, seasonal, and agricultural features in the lived experience of these sites. Additional projects include the depiction of ruins in the lead up to the Armenian Genocide, as well as cross-cultural and cross-species interactions in the region. Her work has been generously supported by fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks and the Getty Research Institute as well as grants from NAASR, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Medieval Academy of America.
Brian Lander studies the environmental history of China. He is particularly interested in the long term transformation of the natural ecosystems of the Yellow and Yangzi river valleys into human ecosystems, including farms, tree plantations and fish ponds. China's lowlands are now home to hundreds of millions of people, so the first step in understanding their environmental history is reconstructing their long-lost vegetation and wildlife. The next step is to understand how human societies came to dominate these regions, a process that began with the domestication of plants and animals, and continued with the growth of states and empires. As a way of exploring these issues from another angle, he has studied the history of pigs, cattle, rhinoceroses, and soybeans. He is the author of The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire, and other works.
Jeffrey Moser is Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. His research attends, broadly, to the conceptual and material processes whereby past things are made present, with particular attention to the ways in which these processes intersect in the artistic practices and scholarly techne of medieval China. His book Nominal Things: Bronzes in the Making of Medieval China (University of Chicago Press, 2023), was awarded the Bei Shan Tang prize from the Association of Asian Studies. Other publications include the co-edited volume Countless Sands: Medieval Buddhists and Their Environments (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2025) and essays on such subjects as epigraphy, ceramics, and the geoaesthetics of rock-cut Buddhist sculpture. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, the Bard Graduate Center, ACLS, and the Library of Congress, among others. He has taught at Zhejiang University and McGill University and, in 2025, was the Hulsewé-Wazniewski Visiting Professor at Leiden University.
Jason Protass is a historian of Chinese Buddhism. He specializes in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, the period of the Northern Song (960-1127) and its legacies. His is the author of The Poetry Demon: Song-dynasty Monks on Verse and the Way (2021), the co-edited volume Countless Sands: Medieval Buddhists and their Environments (2025), as well as essays and chapters on Buddhist literature, Chan practices, manuscripts and book history, and riverine Buddhism. He is currently working on a book project "Heart of the River: A Buddhist History of China's Southeastern Waterways."
Amy G. Remensnyder joined the Brown faculty in 1993 as an assistant professor of History. Named the Stephen Robert Assistant Professor in 1995, she was promoted to associate professor in 1998 and to full professor in 2014. She earned her A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard University, studied at Cambridge University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, and received her Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Berkeley. Her honors include the Van Courtland Elliott Prize from the Medieval Academy of America, Brown’s William G. McLoughlin Award for Teaching Excellence, and Brown’s Academic Advisor Award. She has held research fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and most recently, the Käte Hamburger Kolleg of the Ruhr-Universität in Germany. The author of a book about medieval monasteries and collective memory in southern France (Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France, 1995), she has just published another about the Virgin Mary as a symbol of conquest and conversion in medieval Spain and colonial Mexico (La Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary at War and Peace in the Old and New Worlds, 2014). She is a co-editor of Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice (2011) and is the director of the Brown History Education Prison Project. Her professional service includes terms as a councilor of the Medieval Academy of America and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies.
Benjamin Ridgway (白睿偉, PhD, University of Michigan) is an independent scholar. Research interests include classical Chinese poetry, travel literature, urban space, and ecocriticism. His articles are published in CLEAR, JCLC, JSYS, Postmedieval, and in Senses of the City (CUHK, 2017). His first book, Longing for Landscape: Displacement, Locality, and Cultural Memory in Song Dynasty Lyrics will be published by Harvard University Asia Center in Spring 2026. In ecocritical writings, Professor Ridgway co-edited with Evan Nicholl-Johnson (University of Alberta) the special issue Postmedieval on ecocritical approaches to East Asian literatures, entitled, “Imagining the Palaeoanthropocene in East Asia” in 2023 and published, “Between the Placid Mirror and Roiling Waves: The Materiality of Water and the Literary Imagination of Hangzhou in Poetry of the Tang-Song Era” in Xiaolin Duan and Antonio López, ed. Spring Dawn and Su Causeway: History and Landscape Culture of Hangzhou’s West Lake (Brill, 2026).
Gretel Rodríguez specializes in the art, architecture, and archaeology of the Roman Empire. Her work investigates the relationship between art and society, exploring issues of viewership, identity, and acculturation in relation to ancient artistic production. Her publications deal with Roman honorific architecture, the iconography of captives on public monuments, painted ceramics in the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia, and, the architecture and material culture of water sanctuaries throughout the Mediterranean world. Professor Rodríguez’s secondary specialization is in the art and architecture of ancient Mesoamerica. She has conducted research in Rome, the Bay of Naples, Southern France, Greece, and in Chiapas, Mexico. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Archaeology, RES Anthropology and Aesthetics, and the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal. Her book, Roman Honorific Arches from Augustus to Constantine, will be published soon by Cambridge University Press.
Ittai Weinryb teaches and writes on medieval and early modern art and material and visual culture from the greater Mediterranean to Eurasia and the Indian Ocean. He is currently researching a book on the history and place of “images not made by human hands” (acheiropoieta images) in the pre-modern world, and another which centers on the sentiment of Hope as a category of artistic creativity. He is the co-editor of the book series Art/Work which is set to narrate a new history of art founded in the study of objects, materials, and technology. He is the author of The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages (2016) and of Die Hildesheimer Avantgarde: Kunst und Kolonialismus im mittelalterlichen Deutschland (2023), Art and Frontier: The Black Sea in the Global Middle Ages (2027), and the curator of the curator of the exhibition Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place (2018).