Tracy Chapman Hamilton

Tracy Chapman Hamilton’s research and teaching focus on the practice and theory of the global ancient, medieval, and early modern periods, especially rooted in questions of gender studies, collecting, spatiality, and material culture. How women made themselves visible through patronage is the subject of her book Pleasure and Politics at the Court of France: The Artistic Patronage of Queen Marie of Brabant (1260-1321) (Brepols 2019) and collection, Moving Women Moving Objects 400-1500, co-edited by Mariah Proctor-Tiffany (Brill 2019). She is currently working on a series of articles, her second book, The Ceremonial Landscape: Art, Gender, and Geography the Late Medieval World, and a digital project, Globally Mapping the Medieval Woman.

Hamilton approaches the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds as a fabric of numerous interwoven threads stretching across the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe. Her courses center on this global nature of visual culture, looking in particular at the many peoples surrounding the Mediterranean basin, including those of Ancient and Late Antique Rome, Byzantium, the northern European lands, and Spanish, African, and Asian Islam, as well as their relationships with sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South Asia, and connections to the Americas. As in her scholarship, her pedagogy is rooted in questions of materiality, gender studies, and spatiality analyzed in visual, heuristic, haptic, and digital applications. Her definition of material culture is widely writ and offers students multiple avenues to the examination of past cultures and periods in the forms of precious jewels and metalwork, carved ivory, wood, and stone, the painted page, the woven textile, and fired ceramic and glass. She approaches these objects spatially to include both the exterior and interior spaces framing them as well as the ritual and journeys that often joined them together.

Hamilton is convinced that when teaching and research are combined this synthesis works to everyone’s greatest benefit. She loves watching students have their first contact with art history in the Survey of Art and then seeing them develop a visual eye and critical mind in intermediate and upper-level classes. Remaining in her disciplinary silo is not part of Hamilton’s professional DNA. In fact, it is a major factor in why she chose to become an art historian and has thrived within the field of the Digital Humanities. It is core to her beliefs that cross-disciplinary interaction is a requirement in higher education, necessary to its long-term survival, in large part because it models for and alerts students to the heterogeneous and multivalent nature of the larger world. She is convinced that this inseparable combination of teaching, research, mentorship, and public outreach is essential to the ongoing success of the diverse public university.

Hamilton received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kress and DuPont Foundations, the International Center of Medieval Art, and, in 2017, was the first Mellon Fellow in the Digital Humanities at The Villa I Tatti, Harvard University’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in 2016-17.