Research

THOMAS E.A. DALE, Professor of Medieval and Byzantine Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, joined the faculty in 1999 after teaching for nine years at Columbia University in New York. He received his B.A. in art history from the University of Toronto and his M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the Johns Hopkins University. His frst book, Relics, Prayer and Politics in Medieval Venetia (Princeton University Press, 1997) explores the role of images in promoting both thaumaturgical and political functions of the cult of the saints. His second book, an edited collection of essays, Shaping Sacred Space and Institutional Identity in Romanesque Mural Painting (Pindar Press, 2002) focuses on the ways in which programs of narrative painting in Romanesque churches function as representations of sacred space, ritual and insti tutional politics. A third book nearing completion, Romanesque Corporealities, re-conceptualizes our
understanding of European images of the eleventh and twelfth-centuries by taking into an increased valorization of the physical body, vision and the senses as the means of spiritual access. A fourth book in progress will focus on the theme of cultural exchange between Venice, Byzantium and the Islamic east in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.