Elena N. Boeck (Ph.D., Yale) is Professor of History of Art at DePaul University and specializes in the arts of the medieval Mediterranean world. A native of Riga, Latvia, she traces her ancestral origins to Romania and Russia. Her publications explore intellectual exchange in the Mediterranean and unconventional, fascinating forms of engagement with Byzantium's legacy. Her current book project, The Legend of Troy in the Middle Ages: Imagining Migration as Regeneration, focuses on intellectual and visual construction of Troy in the medieval imagination. She was awarded the DePaul University Humanities Center Fellowship for 2022-24 for this project.
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 the Advanced Academia Programme Fellow at Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia, Excellence Initiative Professor at Radboud University, Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and as consulting curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Her teaching encompasses the Mediterranean world from the ancient to early modern periods, along with theory and methodology. She also teaches Honors Program classes on medieval Spain, the Crusades, Constantinople, and late antiquity.
For up-to-date information on her publications, please see https://depaul.academia.edu/ElenaBoeck