Office Hours: Mondays 3:00-5:00pm, in Arts 2310
Specialization:
Byzantine and East Christian arts; Coptic art; Mediterranean studies; the Global Middle Ages
Education:
Ph.D. University of Michigan
B.A. Lafayette College
Bio:
Heather Badamo writes on the arts of the Byzantine and East Christian worlds. Her research focuses on the intersection of Christian and Islamic visual cultures, especially the circulation of objects across the frontier zones of the eastern Mediterranean, with the related dissemination and transformation of artistic forms, ideas, and beliefs. Primary academic interests include premodern globalism, violence, and visual strategies for communal self-fashioning. She conducts research in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Georgia, and Turkey. In 2005–2006, she participated in a conservation project led by the American Research Center in Egypt and the Coptic Museum in Cairo.
Her book, entitled Saint George Between Empires: Image and Encounter in the Medieval East (Penn State University Press, 2023), investigates how rival Christian and Muslim communities mobilized portraits of St. George to stake a claim to their place in a world of many faiths. It reveals how eastern Christians, Franks, and Muslims employed St. George to imagine sovereignty, orthodoxy, and communal belonging, blurring the boundaries between the foreign and the familiar, and transforming him into a universal hero. Her publications appear in The Medieval Globe, Gesta, and RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics. Her current project, Art and Religion in the Age of Arabization: Copts in the Medieval Islamic World, focuses on the arts and intellectual cultures of the “Coptic Arabic Renaissance,” examining how medieval lay and religious elites mobilized the sacred arts to ensure the continuation of the Coptic Church in the midst of seismic changes—paradoxically reaching across religious boundaries to preserve their own faith.
Badamo’s research has received support from the Getty Research Institute, Fulbright Foundation, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and the University of California. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Michigan in 2011 and was a Harper-Schmidt Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago from 2011-2015.
Publications:
“The Shifting Dynamics of Egyptian-Ethiopian Exchange in Medieval Christian Art,” in Ethiopia at the Crossroads, edited by Christine Sciacca (Baltimore: Walters Art Museum, 2024), 177–83.
Saint George Between Empires: Image and Encounter in the Medieval East (College Park: Penn State University Press, 2023).
Other Media:
Dr. Heather Badamo, "Portrait of a Coptic Patriarch 
," in Smarthistory, July 8, 2024, accessed September 26, 2024.