Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Website URL: https://artandarchaeology.princeton.edu/people/staff/pamela-patton

Keywords: medieval art, medieval Iberia, iconography, race and ethnicity in the Middle Ages

About Me: Pamela Patton’s scholarship centers on the visual culture of medieval Spain and its environs, particularly the role of the image in articulating cultural identity and social dynamics among the multiethnic communities of the Iberian Peninsula. Central to her work is the exploration of medieval iconographic traditions as uniquely expressive of community ideologies, practices, and folkways critical to modern understanding of the medieval world. Her current research and forthcoming publications concern the depiction and meanings of skin color in Iberia and the western Mediterranean.

Before joining Princeton in 2015, Patton was professor and chair of art history at Southern Methodist University. She is a coeditor of Studies in Iconography and an editorial board member of Oxford Bibliographies in Art History.

Recent Publications: Books:

Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America; “Medieval and Early Modern Iberia” series, 62. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2016.

Art of Estrangement: Redefining Jews in Reconquest Spain. College Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2012.

Articles:

“The Other in the Middle Ages: Difference, Identity, and Iconography,” in The Routledge Companion to Medieval Iconography, Colum Hourihane, ed. London: Routledge, 2017, 492-503.

“An Ethiopian-Headed Serpent in the Cantigas de Santa María: Sin, Sex, and Color in Late Medieval Castile.” Gesta 55/2 (2016), 213-38.

“The Little Jewish Boy: Afterlife of a Byzantine Legend in Thirteenth-Century Spain.” In Byzantine Images and Their Afterlives: Essays in Honor of Annemarie Weyl Carr, ed. Lynn Jones. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014, 61-80.