Jill Caskey
Associate Professor of Medieval Art
Undergraduate Appointment: Department of Visual Studies, UTM
Graduate Appointment: Department of Art, St. George
Cross-Appointment/Affiliation: Centre for Medieval Studies, St. George (PhD Coordinator)
Contact
jill.caskey@utoronto.ca
905-828-3742
CCT 3061, UTM
Education
PhD, History of Art, Yale University
MA, History of Art, Yale University
AB, Growth and Structure of Cities, Bryn Mawr College
Biography
My interests in medieval art gravitate toward the mobile – merchants, conquerors, pilgrims, relics, and portable objects – and their intersections with the immobile, or architecture, wall painting, mosaics, and architectural sculpture. I have probed these intersections primarily by analyzing the dynamics of patronage in southern Italy and Sicily from ca. 1050 to 1350. I am continually drawn to that region because of its ever-shifting relationships to both northern Europe and the diverse, contested Mediterranean basin. In the classroom, however, I focus on the larger themes probed in my research rather than on southern Italy per se. Matters of patronage and religious identity loom large in my teaching, for instance, as do the points of intersection between the Christian West and the Islamic and Byzantine worlds.
Current Research Projects
My current research examines the patronage of major cult and pilgrimage sites in southern Italy around 1300. This project deals with a range of art forms and media, from great church architecture to the old and newly made contents of church treasuries, and their impact on the production of sacred space in an era of cultural, religious, and political transformation.
Courses Taught
Undergraduate Courses
Art of the Medieval Mediterranean
Art of the Medieval North
Pilgrimage
Early Christian Art
Rome
Gothic Architecture
Women and Medieval Art
Graduate Courses
Problems in Patronage
Art & Architecture of Medieval Pilgrimage
Medieval Rome
Multicultural Middle Ages
Select Publications
Essays
Jill Caskey, “The Look of Liturgy: Identity and ars sacra in Southern Italy,” in Ritual and Space in the Middle Ages. Proceedings of the Harlaxton Symposium 2009, ed. by Frances Andrews (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2011), pp. 108-129.
Jill Caskey, “Stuccoes from the Early Norman Period in Sicily: Fabrication, Figuration, and Integration,” Medieval Encounters 17 (2011), pp. 80-119.
Jill Caskey, “Whodunnit? Patronage, the Canon, and the Problematics of Agency in Romanesque and Gothic Art,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, edited by Conrad Rudolph (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2006), pp.193-212.
Books
Art and Patronage in the Medieval Mediterranean: Merchant Culture in the Region of Amalfi. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004.
Jill Caskey, Adam S. Cohen, and Linda Safran, eds., Confronting the Borders of Medieval Art. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
Links
