Ph.D., Harvard University, 2012.

Beatrice Kitzinger specializes in the art of the western Middle Ages. Her book, The Cross, the Gospels and the Work of Art in the Carolingian Age (Cambridge University Press, 2019), examines intersections of artistic media, of pictorial and liturgical space, and of historical, eschatological, and ritual time primarily in manuscript illumination between the 8–10^thcenturies. Kitzinger studies Carolingian-era illumination in an inclusive perspective, focusing on little-studied manuscripts from western France. She analyzes manuscript paintings in close relationship to their codicological contexts and to objects, actions, and spaces outside the boundaries of books, examining the project of book-making relative to a broader view of art-making in the Carolingian world. With Profs. Kathryn Starkey and Fiona Griffiths (Stanford University), Kitzinger is a founding series editor for the interdisciplinary series, Sense, Matter, and Medium: New Approaches to the Middle Ages with De Gruyter press. Kitzinger’s work has been supported by the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Stanford University’s Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities, where she held a postdoctoral appointment before coming to Princeton. Kitzinger has worked in museums and libraries in Europe and the US, and taught for the Prison University Project at San Quentin Prison while at Stanford.

Kitzinger’s current research focuses on the intersection of narrative and history in early medieval art, and she is reviving a longstanding interest in the relationship between art and theater in the Middle Ages. Her departmental course offerings reflect these topics, along with emphasis on the materials and techniques of medieval artwork, the function and status of medieval art, relationships between medieval artistic media, and those between medieval art and society. She also teaches for the HUM sequence and with Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative.