(MA in Art History, Humboldt University, Berlin; PhD in Late Antique and Byzantine Art History, Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich) is an art historian of Late Antique, Byzantine, and Western medieval art with a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean and Italy. His work explores changes and transformations across cultures, questions of presence within artworks and architecture, and Byzantine artistic heritage in Venice. During his doctoral research, he spent a year at Columbia University in New York as a visiting scholar. Since 2016, he has been an assistant professor of art history at the University of Leipzig, where he teaches courses on late antique, byzantine, and early medieval art and architecture. He has held research residencies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, and the Centro Tedesco in Venice. His scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the Protestant Academic Scholarship Fund, the Minerva Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation. In 2019, he was the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation postdoctorate fellow for Byzantine Studies at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Armin has chaired a conference panel on natural disasters at the College Art Association in New York and one on issues of presence at the ICMS in Kalamazoo. In addition, he has organized two international conferences, one in Munich (Erzeugung und Zerstörung von Sakralität zwischen Antike und Mittelalter 2015) and one in Leipzig (Picturing the Present: Gegenwart im Bild und Bild in der Gegenwart 2018). His first book, entitled Visionserwartungen: Visualisierung und Präsenzerfahrung des Göttlichen in der Spätantike, was published by Reichert press and received the Hans-Janssen award from the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Göttingen. Other recent publications have appeared in the journals Millennium, the Journal of Late Antiquity, and Gesta.x

Chiara received her PhD from Tuscia University in Viterbo (2010). She was then awarded post-doctoral fellowships at Tuscia University and Koç University in Istanbul (senior fellow at the Research Centre for Anatolian Civilizations; Tübitak research fellow). Since 2007, she has been a member of a Tuscia University research project in Cappadocia. Her main research interests are the issue of images in the Early Christian age and the Iconoclast era, and Medieval painting in Rome and Cappadocia. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Early Medieval Studies, she carried out a project devoted to the reception and the cult of images in the Early Medieval West from the Early Christian to the Carolingian era, investigating textual sources in connection with visual evidence.

Luca graduated in 2021 from the Department of Art History, Masaryk University and at the University of Bologna. Luca obtained his BA (2014) with a thesis dedicated to an iconological study of the twelfth-century facade of the cathedral of San Rufino in Assisi. This research topic was focused on the analysis of the works of Gioacchino da Fiore, whose theories influenced the iconographic choices for the sculptural decoration of this Umbrian monument. For his MA (2017), he dedicated his attention to highlighting artistic visual topoi along a section of the so-called Via Francigena in Tuscany (Valdelsa). In 2017, he started work on his dissertation topic. His doctoral research expanded on the results obtained in his Master’s thesis, with a multidisciplinary approach, following three main directions of study: first, a historiographical reassessment of the construction of the Francigena myth; second, a comparison between Christian and Buddhist ritual practices; and third, the revelation of visual constants in the making of artwork related to pilgrimage phenomena.

Chiara studied art history and history at the University of Lausanne (2005-2010), where she then worked as an assistant and lecturer (2013-2018). She obtained her PhD in 2016 (University of Lausanne, University of Münster) with a thesis on early Christian art and patronage in Campania (Una “questione campana”. La prima arte monumentale cristiana tra Napoli, Nola e Capua (secc. IV-VI), Rome, Viella, 2017). During her doctoral research, she received fellowships at the University of Münster (2010-2011) and the Swiss Institute in Rome (2012-2013). Her research focuses on late antique and early medieval art, with special attention to the reconstruction of the original material and historical context of the artworks studied. Between 2018 and 2019, she worked at the Centre for Early Medieval Studies as a post-doc researcher on a project dedicated to the artistic production of Carolingian and Ottonian Rome.

Martin currently studies in the Master’s program at the Department of the History of Art at Masaryk University in Brno. His undergraduate thesis, under the supervision of Ivan Foletti, focused on Christian tattoo art in medieval Europe. His work was also accompanied by practical experiments with historical techniques and materials. He is interested in studying the issue of human bodies as (surfaces for) images or “artistic media” in the Middle Ages. In addition to his art historical training, Martin has a degree in fine woodworking and, for the last four years, he has worked in a furniture restoration and antiquities atelier. Artisanal handicrafts are his hobby, and practical knowledge of the processes and technologies affecting the final artistic result are reflected in his own research. He therefore looks at objects both from the perspective of an art historian and a craftsman.

Michele works at the Centre for Early Medieval Studies as a science communicator. He is currently working as an illustrator for a short animated movies for the project, called “The Potential of Emigration. The Contribution of (not only) Russian Émigrés to the Interwar Europe”, supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic. As a comic book artist, he also participates in other projects at the Centre. Michele studied comic book art at the École Supérieure des Arts Saint-Luc and the École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels, where he graduated in 2012. In collaboration with Nicolas Wouters, he illustrated a comic entitled Les Égarés de Déjima, which was published by the French publishing house Sarbacane in 2018. His cooperation with Sarbacane is ongoing.

Veronika studies in the Master’s program in the Department of Art History at Masaryk University in Brno. In her second year of studies, she spent a semester studying in Armenia, at the Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts. Following this experience, she devoted her Bachelor’s thesis to the seventh-century Armenian cathedral in the city of T’alin. In her thesis, she provided a completely new interpretation not only of the frescoes in the apse of the cathedral, but also of the building itself. Veronika plans to continue to address issues in Armenian medieval art in the future and gradually improve her knowledge of the Armenian and Russian languages. Since 2020, Veronika has helped with various tasks at the Centre. She has recently been involved in the organization and filming of StrědověC JinaX, as well as other popular educational videos for the wider public.

Anastasiia is a student in the Bachelor’s program of Chemistry of Conservation and Restoration of the Faculty of Science at Masaryk University in Brno. During her studies, Anastasia has also developed an interest in art history – she has attended many lectures and field trips with the Department of Art History. Currently, she is finishing her Master’s degree. She worked with the Centre for Early Medieval Studies between 2019 and 2020. Her main calling was helping with the grant project called “The Heritage of Nikodim P. Kondakov in the Experiences of André Grabar and the Seminarium Kondakovianum”.

Since 1976, Herbert Leon Kessler has been a professor at the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, John Hopkins University, Baltimore (USA), and also a member of the Medieval Academy of America (1991) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1995), as well as many other significant medievalist and byzantologist organizations (Dumbarton Oaks Alumni Association, Byzantine Studies Conference, International Centre for Medieval Art, College Art Association of America). Herbert graduated from the University of Chicago in 1961, after which he went on to study at Princeton University under the guidance of Erwin Panowski and Kurt Weitzmann. In his doctoral thesis, which he submitted in 1965, he dealt with illuminated scripts from the ninth century. In 1969-1970, he studied at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, and in 1972-1973, he continued with his postdoctoral studies as a Guggenheim Fellow. Then, in 1973, Herbert Kessler became the head of the department of art history at the University of Chicago, and in 1976, he moved to John Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he has gradually assumed the position of a professor and the head of the department of art history. In 1977, Herbert took part in the organization of the exhibition “The Age of Spirituality” by Kurt Weitzmann, which took place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. With Weitzmann, he then collaborated on two major publications: The Cotton Genesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) and The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue and Christian Art (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1990). In 1984, Herbert Kessler became a Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, John Hopkins University, and he kept this position until 1998. In 1980-86, he was a senior fellow in Dumbarton Oaks. As a professor, he visited Biblioteca Hertziana in Rome (1996-97), Harvard University (2000-2001), and Williams College, Massachusetts (2006-2007). In 2007, an international conference in his honor took place at Centre d’études médiévales in Auxerre, which dealt with Herbert Kessler’s huge contribution to the study of medieval art and beyond. The most important publications by Herbert Kessler include The Illustrated Bible from Tours (Princeton 1977); Studies in Pictorial Narrative (London 1994); (with Johanna Zacharias) Rome 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim (Yale 2000); Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (University of Pennsylvania 2000); Old St.Peter’s and Church Decoration in Medieval Italy (Spoleto 2002); Seeing Medieval Art (Peterborough 2004); Neither God nor Man. Texts, Pictures, and the Anxiety of Medieval Art (Freiburg im Breisgau 2007).

Martin studied Art History at the Masaryk University of Brno where he obtained his MA in 2016, with a thesis on the tower at Torba and its mural paintings from about 800 AD. Afterwards, he spent several months as a predoctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte in Rome and as an intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. He also participated in the experimental project Migrating Art Historians, during which he studied the dialogue between medieval pilgrims, landscape, and architecture. In January 2022, Martin obtained his PhD at the University of Poitiers and the Masaryk University of Brno, with a dissertation on the relationship between monumental mosaic decorations conceived in early medieval Rome and the stational liturgy of the city (Rome 795–844: Ritual Spaces, Presbytery Mosaics, and Stational Liturgy). He is now a research fellow and executive editor at the Centre for Early Medieval Studies in Brno where he is involved in a couple of projects. Thanks to the MSCA-RISE project titled Conques in the Global World, in which he focuses on the early medieval landscape of Conques and its ritualization, he spent, since 2021, several months as a scientific guest at the Graduate Center (CUNY) in New York City and the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte in Rome. He is also involved in the GAČR project titled At the Crossroads of Memories: Art and Representation in 14th-century Venice.

Veronika graduated in 2021 from the Department of Art History, Masaryk University with a thesis focused on precious stones and their representation and use in the artwork of the eighth and ninth centuries in the Latin West. The project of her thesis ties together the iconography of Heavenly Jerusalem with the use of mosaics and stained glass in the decoration of church spaces, as well as the use of precious stones in Carolingian reliquaries and crosses. She spent part of her studies carrying out a foreign research and study stay in Rome at Sapienza University. Her thesis is supervised by Professor Ivan Foletti, MA, Docteur es Lettres at Masaryk University and associate professor Franesca Dell’Acqua, MA, PhD from the University of Salerno.

Sabina is a PhD student in the Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University and Sapienza University of Rome. At Masaryk University, she graduated in art history and history. She has been fortunate to spend a couple of semesters studying at the Roman university La Sapienza and at the Université de Poitiers in France, as well as at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte) in Rome as an intern. In her Master’s studies, she became a Migrating Art Historian, thanks to the project of the same name, which changed more than just her understanding of science. Her research focuses are historiographical questions and reflections on objects from a longue durée perspective. In her dissertation, she attempts to reassess the artistic production in 10th-century Rome. Furthermore, she is a co-researcher for the project “The Potential of Emigration. The Contribution of (not only) Russian Émigrés to the Interwar Europe” supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic.

Katarína is a Bachelor’s student in the Department of the History of Art at Masaryk University in Brno. She has attended field trips to Georgia, Armenia, and, recently, Rome. Katarína has been part of the Centre for Early Medieval Studies since 2020, where she has helped with the DILPS electronic database and the fourth volume of the upcoming booklet Travelogues, dedicated to the monuments of the Southern Caucasus.

Petr studied Informatics, History of Art and Aesthetics at Masaryk University. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree in History of Art and Aesthetics with a thesis about Joel-Peter Witkin and his usage of dead bodies in 2014. Early on in his studies, he started cooperating with the Centre for Early Medieval Studies as a graphic designer, particularly for the lecture series StředověC JinaX. Between 2017 and 2021, he was a regular staff member of the Centre. His duties included the desktop publishing of books, poster design, photo editing, etc. He is interested in historiography, the theory and history of photography, icon-painting, and the philosophy of art.