Liz James

Professor Liz James is an eminent British Art Historian who studies the art of the Byzantine Empire. She is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Sussex.[1]

Career

Professor James is from Derby, East Midlands. James received an undergraduate degree at the University of Durham in Ancient History and Archeology. She then did a Master's degree in Byzantine studies at the University of Birmingham. She received her doctorate at the Courtauld Institute in London, studying under Robin Cormack with a thesis discussing light and colour in Byzantine art. Upon completion, James embarked on postdoctoral fellowships, notably at the Barber Institute. In 1993 she joined the University of Sussex;[2] in 2007 she was awarded Professorship at that university.

Interests

James is known as a keen promotor of all areas of Byzantine art and Byzantine culture. In particular she has interests in mosaics and gender issues. She has written extensively on mosaics, discussing practical, iconographic and materialistic approaches to the subject. She has also established a database of Byzantine glass mosaics.[3] James is known for her interests in gender; discussing Byzantine empresses, eunuchs and the way Byzantine society reacted to gender. James is also interested in the relationship between text and image, believing Byzantine texts to be of the same importance as the art they produced.

Other

Her Professorial Lecture was held in 2011 and discussed the mosaics in the apse of Hagia Sophia.[4]

James contributed to the Royal Academy's 2008 Byzantium exhibition catalogue and gave a lecture to the academy.[5]

Publications

Books

Empresses and Power in Early Byzantium (Leicester University Press, 2001)

Light and Colour in Byzantine Art (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996)

Edited books

Art and Text in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Introduction, and paper, '"And shall these mute stones speak?" Text as image'.

Icon and Word. The power of images in Byzantium (Ashgate, 2003), editor with Antony Eastmond, and contributor, "Introduction: Icon and Word", xxix–xxxiv, and "Art and Lies: Text, image and imagination in the medieval world", 59–72.

Desire and Denial in Byzantium (Variorum, Aldershot, 1999)

Women, men and eunuchs: gender in Byzantium (Routledge, London, 1997), editor and contributor, "Introduction: Women's Studies, Gender Studies, Byzantine Studies", xi–xxiv

Other publications

References

  1. Liz James University of Sussex profile page, URL: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/1380.
  2. AHRB Centre for Byzantine Cultural History, URL: http://www.byzantine-ahrb-centre.ac.uk/Staff/Liz.htm.
  3. The Composition of Byzantine Glass Mosaic Tesserae, URL: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/byzantine/mosaic/
  4. Professorial Lecture: Byzantine Art: all that glitters is gold, URL: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/newsandevents/sussexlectures/lecturemov?id=64.
  5. Women, Men and Eunuchs: The Three Sexes in Byzantium, Royal Academy Lecture, URL: http://static.royalacademy.org.uk/files/lizjames-414.mp3.
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