Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Visualizing the Past

Digital Humanities Meet-Up with Caroline Bruzelius (Duke University)

Tuesday, October 9^th, 12-1pm

Library West 212: Nygren Scholar’s Studio

Join us for a conversation about how we can combine historical manuscripts and artistic renderings with ground-penetrating radar, laser scanning, 3D modeling and other digital technologies to understand and interpret material culture. Dr. Caroline Bruzelius will discuss her recent digital humanities projects Visualizing Venice and the Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database. Feel free to bring a brown-bag lunch. This event is co-sponsored by the Mellon Intersections Group on Imagineering and the Technosphere.

Caroline Bruzelius is a digital humanist with scholarly expertise in medieval architecture, urbanism, and sculpture.  She has written extensively on religious architecture of the Middle Ages in France and Italy, publishing books and articles on French Gothic architecture (St.-Denis and Notre-Dame in Paris, for example) and on medieval South Italy.  Her most recent book (2014), Preaching, Building and Burying.  Friars in the Medieval City (Yale University Press), focuses on how the religious practices introduced by the Franciscans and Dominicans (outdoor preaching, visiting laymen in homes, and burying townspeople in convents) transformed cities.  Bruzelius is presently working on two new book projects: “The Cathedral and the City,” a study of the urban and financial implications of cathedral building, and another volume on the role of architecture in the creation of state identity in the medieval Kingdom of Sicily.  Bruzelius is a leader in Digital Art History, exploring how digital technologies communicate narratives about art and the built environment in teaching, museums, and in research.  She is a founding member of the “Wired!” group at Duke University, a group that integrates visualization technologies with teaching, engaging undergraduate and graduate students in multi-year research initiatives. She is also a founder of the two international and interdisciplinary collaborations, Visualizing Venice and the Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database.  From 1994 to 1998 Bruzelius was Director of the American Academy in Rome.  She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Medieval Academy of America, the Society of Antiquaries (London), and has received numerous other awards in the United States and abroad.