Jesús Rodríguez Viejo

Assistant Professor in Art History & Material Culture, Dept. of Art History, Architecture, and Landscape, University of Groningen
The Netherlands

PhD (Edinburgh), History of Art, 2015-19
MA (Leiden), 2012-13; ResMA (Paris-Sorbonne), 2013-15
BA Hons. (Oviedo, Naples); 2007-10, 2010-12

I worked at the University of Aberdeen as a teaching assistant in Spanish & Latin American Studies (2019, 2021) and as a DAAD postdoc researcher at the Goethe-University of Frankfurt (2020). I also worked at Edinburgh College of Art as a teaching assistant from 2017 to 2019 and in 2021, and as a full-time Conservation intern at the Jewish Museum of Paris (2014). I also organised a two-day international conference on early medieval illuminated manuscript cultures at Edinburgh in June 2018 - 'Illuminating the Dark Ages' (see programme and CfP below).

I study the material cultures of Western Europe and the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century with a focus on performative objects and social and religious history. I am keen on exploring through multidisciplinary approaches beliefs and identities, disasters and violence,  perceptions of race and otherness (especially interreligious); architecture and public religion, as well as phenomena of conversion and interactions between Christianity and Islam in my native Spain. I also study pre-1580 Dutch-Spanish art relations and early colonial continuations in the realm of material religion and hybridity, particularly in Spanish-speaking Latin America.

My doctoral project at the University of Edinburgh was sponsored by Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) through a full PhD scholarship (2015-2018) open to all applicants. The thesis analysed the manuscript production of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of St Gallen Abbey in the Ottonian and early Salian periods, gendered devotion, and public religion. One of the highlights of my PhD studies at Edinburgh was also the identification of the patroness portrait of the late twelfth-century Fécamp Psalter (The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 76 F 13) with the French and English Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204). See more details on the new website of the Dutch Royal Library created after the publication of my article (2016):

https://www.kb.nl/en/themes/medieval-manuscripts/psalter-of-eleanor-of-aquitaine-ca-1185

I am also an alumnus of Moscow's Pushkin Institute (2009) and I am also competent in Classical Latin and Medieval Latin palaeography after receiving training during my two-year exchange in Naples and in Paris (EHESS). I am a member of the Spanish Society for Medieval Studies (SEEM) and Byzantine Studies (SEB), the Henry Bradshaw Society in Cambridge, the Episcopus Network, the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain, BIPS, and the Neapolitan Network. I am also a reviewer for the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) journal 'Estudios Bizantinos', published by Barcelona University Press, and for 'Speculum', Medieval Academy of America (Chicago University Press).

ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2744-0279
Supervisors: Prof. Heather Pulliam (UoE), Prof. Niels Gaul (UoE), Prof. Alain George, Oxford (2015-16), Prof. Adam Cohen, Toronto (External Supervisor), and Dr. Beatrice Kitzinger, Princeton (First-Year Supervisor)