Deborah Kahn

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Deborah Kahn (Associate Professor) is a specialist in European art and architecture of the Middle Ages with special interests in the historical context of monumental stone sculpture, its iconography and the transmission of images.

She did graduate work at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and subsequently served as a consultant on sculpture and conservation at Canterbury and Lincoln Cathedrals and as an organizer of the exhibition, English Romanesque Art 1066-1200. She is the author of numerous articles, as well as three books Canterbury Cathedral and its Romanesque Sculpture (1991) and The Romanesque Frieze and its Spectator (editor, 1992). Her most recent book The Politics of Sanctity (Brepols, 2021) identified long overlooked sculpture from around the year 1000 that depicts the manufacture a new saint in conjunction with images of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim sentiment.

Her recently published article in the Bulletin Monumental and the forthcoming article with the British Archaeological Association focus on the transmission of motifs at the millennium.

Professor Kahn has served on the Advisory Board of the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in the British Isles and the Art of Medieval Europe Committee at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in London. Her current research continues her interest on the transmission of imagery in the early middle ages. In addition, she is working on the early nineteenth century history and iconography of monuments in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

She offers a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses on medieval art and architecture – including a seminar on the Bayeux Tapestry and its Context as well as an autumn seminar on Mount Auburn.

Curriculum Vitae

Selected Publications

	The Politics of Sanctity. Selles-sur-Cher and its Sculpture.  Turnhout, Brepols, 2021.
	“The Engoulant: Development, Symbolic Meaning and Wit, ”Melanges Offertes a Eliane Vergnolle, Ex quadris lapidibus. La pierre dans l’art médiéval, éditions. ed Y. Gallet. Brepols: Société française d’archéologie, 2012.