Associate Professor Diliana Angelova (History of Art, History) has received two awards to develop her current book-length project, titled The Reign of Eros: Classicism, Secularism, and the Erotic Imaginary in Byzantium and Beyond. The first is a year-long (2021-2022) fellowship at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley, which will provide course relief and a supportive community to discuss work in progress. The second is a Dumbarton Oaks Project Grant, which will send her to museums around the US and Europe, where she will photograph Byzantine boxes decorated with Greco-Roman myths and playful Erotes. The boxes, the primary source material for the monograph, constitute the largest category of secular objects that survive from medieval Byzantium. Their irreverent themes and eroticism contrast emphatically with mainstream Byzantine cultural production. With the help of Undergraduate Student Assistants and the V-Lab at History of Art, Angelova has created a website that documents these fascinating objects with the latest techniques of image-making and viewing, such as 3D models, and RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imagery).
