Merih Danali

Assistant Professor

Art History: Byzantine Art and Architecture, Medieval European Art and Architecture, intersections of Medieval Art and Science

E-mail: cantarm@wfu.edu
Phone: 336-758-5310

Merih Danali (Penn State University, M.A.; Harvard University, Ph.D.) teaches the history of medieval art and architecture. She specializes in the visual language of Byzantine astronomical and cosmological diagrams. Her research interests include medieval aesthetics and Neoplatonism, manuscript studies, medieval portraits, and cross-cultural artistic exchanges between Byzantium and the Islamic world (ca. 1260–1453). Her current book project Art, Science, and Religious Devotion in Fourteenth-Century Byzantium focuses on cosmological illustrations in a fourteenth-century Greek scientific miscellany (Marcianus Graecus 516) and explores the ways in which the illustrations reflect a particular worldview that blends Christian moral philosophy, Pythagorean number symbolism, and Platonic cosmology. Her research has been supported by Princeton University, the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies; Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection; Koç University, Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations; University of Vienna, The Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. 

Courses

ART 105. History of World Architecture
ART 246. Byzantine Art and Architecture 
ART 250. Artistic Exchanges in the Mediterranean,500-1400
ART 394. Issues in Art History