Professor Nancy Thebaut

Nancy Thebaut is an Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and a Tutorial Fellow of St Catherine’s College. She is a historian of European medieval art and architecture. Her current research interests fall into two broad categories: the interplay of works of art, ritual practices, and theology, especially ca. 800-1200, and the ways that objects shaped and subverted notions of gender, sexuality, and desire in the long Middle Ages. To date, her publications have focused primarily on medieval manuscripts, namely their illuminations and the ivory relief carvings that once adorned their covers.

Her current book project, Lessons in Looking: Difficult Images of Christ, ca. 850-1050, studies a selection of narrative images in liturgical manuscripts that depict moments at which seeing Christ is at stake. It explores how artists became increasingly interested in representing the difficulty of vision and belief in ways that honed their viewers’ ability to apprehend Christ. A second book project focuses on images of Lot’s wife, specifically the moment at which she looks back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and turns into a pillar of salt. 

Nancy is also committed to bringing art history to a broad public through curatorial work. She is co-curating with Melanie Holcomb an exhibition on gender, sexuality, and love in medieval art that will open at The Cloisters (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) in 2025. She has also pursued curatorial projects at the Tang Teaching Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Musée Carnavalet, and Musée de Cluny. 

Prior to joining Oxford, Nancy was Assistant Professor of Art History at Skidmore College. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago, her MA from the Ecole du Louvre and Courtauld Institute, and her BA from Agnes Scott College. Her work has been supported by various grants, including a US Fulbright Scholarship at the Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale at the University of Poitiers, a NOMIS fellowship at eikones (University of Basel), and a Kress Foundation History of Art Institutional Fellowship at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Paris).  

She is interested in supervising research on a range of object types and topics, including pre-1200 manuscript illuminations and ivory carvings; medieval art and liturgy; and gender and sexuality.