Elena N. Boeck (Ph.D., Yale; professor at DePaul University) specializes in the arts of the medieval Mediterranean world. Her publications explore intellectual exchange in the Mediterranean and unconventional, fascinating forms of engagement with Byzantium’s legacy. Her current book project is The Legend of Troy in the Middle Ages: Imagining Migration as Regeneration, focuses on intellectual and visual construction of Troy in the medieval imagination. In places as diverse as Madrid and Moscow, Britain and Bulgaria a fascination with Troy and its resilient refugees captured the imagination of medieval patrons. The story of Troy after antiquity foregrounds forced migrations and cultural regenerations as cornerstones of the global historical process.
She is the author of Imagining the Byzantine Past: The Perception of History in the Illustrated Manuscripts of Skylitzes and Manasses (Cambridge University Press 2015; paperback edition 2018) and The Bronze Horseman of Justinian in Constantinople: The Cross-Cultural Biography of a Mediterranean Monument (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Most recently, she edited Afterlives of Byzantine Monuments in Post-Byzantine Times (Heidelberg: Herlo Verlag UG, 2021), which focuses on selective, strategic and self-conscious engagement with Byzantium. Her other research interests include icons of the Three-Handed Mother of God, the rediscovery of Byzantium in the nineteenth century, and Muscovite devotional images influenced by counter-Reformation print culture.
She held appointments as the Excellence Initiative Professor at Radboud University, Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and the consulting curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.