Francesca ​Dell'Acqua

Associate Professor

DISPAC, Università di Salerno

Francesca Dell’Acqua Boyvadaoğlu has a long-standing intellectual engagement with the cultural history of the medieval West and the Mediterranean region. She is interested in how objects and the visual functioned as carrier of ideas and knowledge, and how visual, material, and intellectual aspects intersected and shaped cultures. She is Associate Professor in History of Medieval Art at the University of Salerno. She has been fellow at prestigious research institutes including the American Academy in Rome, the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, the Bibliotheca Hertziana/Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte. Between 2015–17 she has been Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (n° 657240, ‘ICONOPHILIA’) at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies of the University of Birmingham. She is affiliated to the ‘Moving Byzantium Project’ since 2017. Her new monograph, Iconophilia: Religion, Politics, and Sacred Images in Italy c.680–880, has appeared in Routledge's series Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies (2020). A book she co-edited with E.S. Mainoldi, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Origins of Christian Visual Culture, has appeared in Palgrave's series New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture (2020). She is now interested in exploring the idea of Mary as emblem of wisdom and authority in the medieval period and how this eventually impacted on the idea of female authority and leadership in past and present societies.

W: https://unisa.academia.edu/FrancescaDellAcqua   

E: dellacquaf(at)gmail.com