Email: awwalker@wustl.edu
Phone: 314-935-4487

Professor Walker’s primary fields of research include cross-cultural artistic interaction in the medieval world from the ninth to thirteenth centuries and gender issues in the art and material culture of Byzantium. She has recently completed articles on the material and intellectual culture of divination in medieval Byzantium and the expression of romance culture in works of middle Byzantine courtly art. She is currently at work on a book length study of Islamic impact on middle Byzantine imperial imagery and is co-editing a volume of essays titled Negotiating the Secular in Medieval Art. In addition, she has published essays on the role of women in Byzantine art and culture and the function and meaning of early Byzantine marriage jewelry.

Professor Walker has participated in archaeological fieldwork in Carthage (modern-day Tunisia), excavating at two sites and publishing on stucco decoration from the early Byzantine pilgrimage complex at Bir Ftouha. She is currently co-publishing the excavation of a late Roman domestic site in Carthage, which she has co-directed from 1999 to the present.

The recipient of numerous museum fellowships, Professor Walker has been a lecturer and curatorial assistant at several prominent American museums, including the Harvard University Art Museums, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. She was a Junior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in the spring of 2004 and a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art and Architectural History at Columbia University from 2004 to 2006.


Courses taught

Professor Walker leads courses on Byzantine, medieval Islamic, and western medieval art, including the following:

Lectures
Introduction to Medieval Islamic Art: The Fatimids
Byzantine Icons in Byzantine Life
The Gothic Cathedral

Seminars
Kings, Caliphs, and Emperors: Images of Authority in the Era of the Crusades



Publications

“Wall Decoration: Stucco and Fresco,” in Susan Stevens et al., eds., Bir Ftouha: A Pilgrimage Church Complex at Carthage, Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series, 59, pp. 410-18, Portsmouth, R.I.: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2005.

“Home: A Space ‘Rich in Blessings’,” “Marriage: ‘A Golden Team’ Byzantine Wives and Husbands,” “Adornment: Enhancing the Body, Neglecting the Soul?” and entries in Ioli Kalavrezou, ed., Byzantine Women and Their World, exh. cat., Harvard University Art Museums, October 2002 – April 2003. 

“Myth and Magic in Early Byzantine Marriage Jewelry: The Persistence of Pre-Christian Traditions,” in Ann McClanan and Karen Encarnación, eds., The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe, pp. 59-78, New York: Palgrave, 2002.

“A Reconsideration of Early Byzantine Marriage Rings,” in Sulochana R. Asirvatham et al., eds., Between Magic and Religion: Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and Society, pp. 149-64, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.     



Recent papers delivered

“The San Marco Censer in Context: Literary and Artistic Depictions of the Middle Byzantine Garden Pavilion.” Thirty-second Byzantine Studies Conference, University of Missouri-St. Louis, November 2006.

“Negotiating the Exotic in Images of the Middle Byzantine Emperor.” International Congress of Byzantine Studies, London, UK, August 2006.

“Byzantine Art and the Modern Era: Reflections and Refractions.” Guest speaker for undergraduate lecture course Early Christian and Byzantine Art. Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, April 2005.

“Foreign Style as Secularizing Element in Middle Byzantine Imperial Imagery.” The Secular World of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 26th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum, Plymouth State University, Plymouth, NH, April 2005.

“Magic and Meaning in Byzantine Art: Pseudo-Arabic Ornament and the San Marco Cup.” College Art Association. Atlanta, GA, February 2005.

“Islam and Byzantium: Cultural Confrontation, Artistic Interaction.” For the lecture series Artistic Exchange on the Mediterranean Rim: Islamic, Byzantine, and European Art, accompanying the exhibition, Palace and Mosque: Islamic Art from the Victoria and Albert Museum. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., October 2004.