Fall 2025 Guest Lecture

On Thursday, October 23rd, we welcomed Prof. Gregory Bryda, Assistant Professor of Art History at Barnard College, for the first talk in our 2025-2026 Guest Lecture Series.

Prof. Bryda’s talk, entitled “Higher Ground: Medieval Foundations and the Formation of Heathen Prehistory,” explored how Christian art from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries exaggerated the pagan connection to the land as a way to juxtapose Christian religious superiority.

Bryda demonstrated how Christians in Austria, Germany, and Poland used works of art to cast the non-Christian peoples of Eastern and Baltic Europe as a primitive “other” who worshipped nature in order to justify Christian expansion into the region. Our guest lecture attracted a wide audience of BU graduate students, faculty and colleagues from Boston College and Harvard University.