A multi-award winning medieval scholar, Tracy Hamilton loves working with students to develop a strong eye and voice that can look critically and creatively at the past so as to better understand where we are today. That journey begins in the Global Survey of Art and continues into courses that span the earth from ancient times to the present with a primary focus on art and architecture of the Late Antique Mediterranean, and Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque eras. She also teaches Women’s Patronage, Digital Humanities, Asian Art, and The Land as Art using a variety of cutting edge pedagogies that have students using their hand, mind, and eye in tandem and prepare them for a myriad of career options.
Courses Taught
Introductory Classes
• First-Year Y:1 seminar • Core 120: The Mindful Writer • Core 130: Women and Gender in the World • Survey of Global Art and Architecture I and II (Survey I taught online as well) • Roman Art and Archaeology • The Late Antique Mediterranean • The Global Middle Ages • Early Medieval Art and Architecture of Europe and the Mediterranean • Islamic Art • The Long Twelfth Century in Art and Architecture of Europe and the Mediterranean • Late Medieval Art and Architecture of Europe and the Mediterranean • A Worldly Art: Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Global Production and Exchange • Art of the Northern Renaissance • Italian Renaissance Art and Architecture • The Global Baroque and Rococo
Upper-Level and Graduate Seminars
• Digital Art History as a Research Tool • Global Women as Makers: the Medieval Patron, Artist, Subject, and Viewer • The Materiality of Gender: Women’s Patronage and Collecting • Objects in Motion: the Globalization of Medieval Art • Art of the Silk Road (first taught as an Honors Seminar) • Medieval Pilgrimage: Relics, Ritual, and Architecture (first taught as a Liberal Arts Engineering course) • The Sacred Landscape: Medieval Global Pilgrimage • From Scribe to Press (first taught as an Honors Seminar) • The Land as Art (first taught as an Honors Seminar) • The Whole World: Cartography as History, Art, and Ideology • The Medieval City (first taught as an Honors Seminar) • Circa 1650: Art in a Global Age • Theories and Methods of Art • Senior Seminar (various topics) • contributor to team-taught Introduction to Gender Studies • contributor to Introduction to Engineering (2010-2015)
Professional workshops
Professional Digital Portfolio Mentor for Savannah College of Art and Design: I helped students to navigate the new realities caused by the current pandemic, which has led to seismic shifts in the world of museums and art historical research. While scholars have benefited from digital resources for many years, the past few quarters have seen the first round of widespread virtual classes, the implementation of virtual internships, and postings for virtual fellowships. In my capacity as a leading digital art historian, I am mentoring their students and faculty to make them as competitive as possible in this transformed digital environment (winter and spring 2021).
“New Tools for a New Year” will feature a series of lectures and workshops focused on online exhibitions as a research assignment, using Artsteps, Omeka, and Esri’s Storymaps. Part of a larger Virtual Mentoring program created for the International Center of Medieval Art in collaboration with Middle Ages for Educators that emerged in the COVID-19 pandemic, this virtual programming will be a regular offering in the future in addition to in-person events (spring 2020-present).
Leader of a workshop on Digital Mapping in Art History and the Humanities, especially for classroom projects, for the consortium of American Universities abroad at the Digital Humanities Institute held at the American University of Beirut in May 2019. Funded in part by the Mellon Foundation and the AMICAL Consortium and preceded by an international introductory webinar on the topic (Nov. 2018).
Publications
Website Projects
MappingtheMedievalWoman
Books
Moving Women Moving Objects 400-1500, eds. Tracy Chapman Hamilton and Mariah Proctor-Tiffany (Brill’s Maps, Spaces, Cultures series, 2019)
Pleasure and Politics at the Court of France: The Artistic Patronage of Queen Marie of Brabant (1260-1321) (Brepols Publishing, Harvey Miller Series, 2019).
Winner of the 2020 International Center of Medieval Art Annual Book Prize
Essays
With Mariah Proctor-Tiffany, “Inscribing Her Presence: Mapping Women in Fourteenth-Century Paris,” Medieval People: Social Bonds, Kinship and Networks Vol. 37: Iss. 1, Article 3 (2022). Available at: https:// scholarworks.wmich.edu/medpros/vol37/iss1/3 also see: MappingtheMedievalWoman.com
Tracy Chapman Hamilton and Mariah Proctor-Tiffany, “Women and the Circulation of Material Culture: Crossing Boundaries and Connecting Spaces,” Moving Women Moving Objects 400-1500, eds. Tracy Chapman Hamilton and Mariah Proctor-Tiffany (Brill’s Maps, Spaces, Cultures series, 2019), 1-12
“Sur la route…The Patronage of Location in Late Capetian France,” Peregrinations vol. 2 (Summer 2009), 77-117
“Queenship and Kinship in the Bible moralisée: the Example of Blanche of Castile and Vienna 2554,” Capetian Women, edited by Kathleen Nolan (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 177-208
Feature essay on the 8th Biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Islamic Art Symposium (Nov. 9-11) and of the Doha museums for the International Center of Medieval Art Newsletter (Spring 2020)
Blog Posts & Website Entries
“Visualizing Research through ArcGIS StoryMaps,” Tool Talk and User Guide for Middle Ages for Educators (April 2021)
“Can COVID-19 Reinvigorate our Teaching? Employing Digital Tools for Spatial Learning,” co-authored with Liz Lastra for Art History Teaching Resources (November 2020)
My research, teaching, and writing focus on Premodern Europe and the Mediterranean within a global context, especially rooted in questions of women’s studies, spatiality, and materiality. These themes can provide the tools and the energy to build commonalities and celebrate diversities in society. In the broadest sense my scholarship examines the means by which artistic creation, patronage, collection, and exchange make women’s lives visible, as revealed through close study of the objects and materials that were created by and for them within the larger socio-political context.
While much of my research has been centered in Europe, the elite women about whom I have primarily written come from both local and distant lands as part of the political marriage market, and the objects and materials they import and consume often come from greater distances still.
My definition of art is widely writ and I offer my audience multiple avenues to examine past cultures and periods in the forms of precious jewels, carved ivory, wood, and stone, the painted page and wall, the woven textile, fired ceramic and glass, and cast metalwork. I approach 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. I bring my research interests in cross-cultural interaction directly into my writing and teaching, drawing on time-tested as well as innovative sources and always forging links between these eras of the past and how they impact and are relevant to current events, the larger public, and our community.
In addition to a deep love of premodern material culture from around the globe, I am interested in how the digital can aid us in forging connections between its diverse cultures as well as with us in the present day.
Therefore, I increasingly look to how digital art history, museum curation, and cultural heritage can visualize the past in ways which enhance our ability to study and see its many facets. Tools that I use to enhance my own, my students, and the larger public’s research and questions include:
- Mapping and database creation
- Photogrammetry and 3D photography
- Virtual exhibitions built with game engines to create alternate display spaces and immersive experiences
- Applying augmented reality to object contextualization and analysis in museums and other cultural institutions
For more information, please visit my personal website.