Elizabeth S. Bolman engages with the visual culture of the eastern Mediterranean in the late antique and Byzantine periods. She is best known for her work in Egypt, in which she has demonstrated the vitality of Christian Egyptian art and presented new understandings of the nature of artistic production in the early Byzantine and Medieval periods. Currently, she is completing a gender studies analysis of depictions of the Byzantine Galaktotrophousa (nursing Virgin Mary). She is currently chair of the Department of Art History and Art at CWRU, where she is beginning a new initiative called art.lab.cle, focusing on the intersections of art history and technology.
Anthony Kaldellis is Professor and Chair of Classics at The Ohio State University. He has published many books and articles on aspects of Byzantine history, culture, and literature, including its reception of the classical past and its Roman identity. He has translated many Byzantine historians into English and is currently writing a new, big history of the eastern empire, from 324 to 1461 AD.
Leonora Neville studies the culture and society of the Eastern Roman Empire, particularly history writing, gender, and the importance of the classical past for medieval Roman culture. Her work explores how performances of culturally normative behaviors create and constrict freedom and authority. Recently she has offered a new interpretation of how the rhetoric of Anna Komnene’s Alexiad worked to portray Anna as a good historian, even though she was a woman, and a good woman, even though she wrote history, and how the modern misinterpretation of those strategies has led to Anna’s reputation as a power-hungry schemer.