Women Scholars of Orthodox Christianity, Featuring Bissera V. Pentcheva

The Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University is delighted to present the seventh episode of its webinar series highlighting the scholarly insights and academic careers of female scholars whose research and writing explore some facet of the history, thought, or culture of orthodox Christianity. The broadcast will be livestreamed and open to all who have preregistered. The event will include some time for live audience questions. For those who miss the live event, the Center will archive each episode on its website and YouTube channel.

This episode features an interview with Bissera V. Pentcheva, professor of art history at Stanford University. She has published three books with Pennsylvania State University Press: Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium (2006), which received the Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America in 2010; The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (2010); and Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space and Spirit in Byzantium (2017), which received the 2018 American Academy of Religion Award in historical studies. She has edited the volumes Aural Architecture (Ashgate, 2017) and Icons of Sound: Architecture, Music and Imagination in Medieval Art (Routledge, 2020). Her work is informed by phenomenology, placing the attention on the changing appearance of objects and architectural spaces. She relies on film to capture this temporal animation stirred by candlelight. Another important strand of her work engages the sonic envelope of the visual—music and acoustics—and employs auralizations that digitally imprint the performance of chant with the acoustic signature of the specific interior for which it was composed.

Orthodox Christian Studies Center events are free and open to the public. The Zoom link will be sent out to all registered participants one to two days prior to the event.