Nancy Thebaut

Assistant Professor of Art History

CONTACT INFORMATION

Office:  N/A 
Phone: N/A
Email:  nthebaut@skidmore.edu

*On Sabbatical for the 2023-2024 academic year.

EDUCATION

• PhD, University of Chicago, 2019
• Diplôme de Muséologie, Ecole du Louvre, 2011
• MA, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2009
• BA, Agnes Scott College, 2008

Nancy Thebaut is a historian of European medieval art and architecture, and her research considers the interplay of works of art, ritual practices, and theology from 800-1200 CE. In her teaching, she focuses on material religion, cultural exchange, as well as queer and feminist approaches to the study of medieval art. Before joining the faculty at Skidmore, Nancy was a postdoctoral NOMIS fellow at eikones, the Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University of Basel.  While writing her 2019 dissertation, "Non est hic: Figuring Christ's Absence in Early Medieval Art," which received the University of Chicago's Feitler Prize, she was  the Kress History of Art Institutional Fellow at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris and a Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she curated an exhibition of medieval manuscript cuttings. Beyond the Art Institute, she has also worked with curators at the Musée Carnavalet and National Museum of the Middle Ages - Musée de Cluny (Paris) on the reinstallation of each museum’s permanent collection. Nancy’s academic interests extend beyond the Middle Ages, too; she has researched and published on the work of feminist artist Judy Chicago, for whom she briefly worked as an assistant, as well as on that of so-called ‘outsider’ and self-taught artists Joseph Yoakum and Eddy Mumma.

COURSES

• AH 110 -  The Middle Ages on the Move: Artistic Exchange in and beyond Europe  
• AH 218 -  Holy Bones: Art and Architecture of the Medieval Cult of Saints  
• AH 234 -  Parchment, Thread, Bread: Materials of Medieval Art  
• AH 346 -  Queering the Middle Ages: Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Art  
• AH 349 -  Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ecologies of Medieval and Renaissance Art  

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• “Zones, Stripes, and Strata: The Banded Grounds of Early Medieval Paintings,” Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art 9 (2023), pp. 1-34. 
• “Représenter l’oeuvre du Christ au IX et Xe siècles,” Trésors du Royaume de Lotharingie: L’héritage de Charlemagne (ed. I. Bardiès-Fronty). In Fine éditions d’art, 2023, pp. 134-137.
• “Outside In: The Role of Influence in ‘Outsider’ Art History,” Journal de l’Université d’été, Bibliothèque Kandinsky (Centre Pompidou), n. 8, 2023. 
• “Au-delà des périodisations: Parcours passés et futurs potentiels,” L’Art médiéval est-il contemporain ? Is Medieval Art Contemporary ? (eds. C. Denoël, I. Marchesin, L. Dryansky). Brepols, 2022, pp. 21-34. 
• “The Double-Sided Image: Abstraction and Figuration in Early Medieval Painting,” Abstraction in Medieval Art: Beyond the Ornament (ed. E. Gertsman). Amsterdam University Press, 2021, pp. 213-242.   
• “Fantastical Forms: The Landscapes and Portraits of Joseph Elmer Yoakum,” Joseph Elmer Yoakum (New York: Venus over Manhattan, 2019), pp. 13-21.
• “Making Art History his Own: The Paintings of Eddy Mumma,” The Art & Life of Eddy Mumma (Baltimore: American Visionary Art Museum, 2016), pp. 24-33. 
• “Bleeding Pages, Bleeding Bodies: A Gendered Reading of British Library MS Egerton 1821,” Medieval Feminist Forum.  Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 175-200.  June 2010.
• “Earth Movers: Quaking up Land Art’s Forgotten Feminist History,” Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture magazine.  No. 48, pp. 36-42. Fall 2010 (Co-author: L. Elizabeth Savage).