Roland Betancourt (PhD, Yale University) is a scholar of Byzantium and modern popular culture with research that lies firmly at the intersection of histories of science and technology, intellectual history, and the history of art. His research has explored theories of sensation and perception, the transmission of ancient knowledge, technical illustrations and diagrams, musicological analyses of texts and their recitation, and the premodern histories of queerness, gender variance, and racialization.
Dr. Betancourt is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine. There, he has received two once-in-a-lifetime honors, including a Chancellor’s Fellowship (2019-2022) and a School of Humanities Faculty Teaching Award (2016). In 2016-2017, he was the Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In 2023, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Betancourt is the author of three monographs, including Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), and Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Byzantine Intersectionality was a finalist for the Award of Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies by the American Academy of Religion. His work has also looked at the role of Byzantium in the modern world and theoretical approaches to the past, as in his co-edited volumes (with Maria Taroutina) Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity (Brill, 2015) and (with Evan Freeman) Byzantine Materiality (DeGruyter, 2023). He is also co-editing a special issue of Speculum for the Medieval Academy of America’s Centennial in 2025.
Dr. Betancourt is the Editor for the ICMA Books | Viewpoints series at the Pennsylvania State University Press and for The Middle Ages book series at the University of Pennsylvania Press, as well as a member of the editorial and review boards of YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies, Exemplaria, and Speculum. Dr. Betancourt also serves on the governing boards of the College Art Association (CAA), the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), the Byzantine Studies Association of North America (BSANA), the Medieval Academy of America (MAA) and the Medievalists of Color (MoC) organization. His popular writing on the Middle Ages has appeared in The Washington Post, Scientific American, TIME, The Conversation, Literary Hub, and The Advocate.
Betancourt is working on several ongoing book projects, including A Plurality of Means: Disneyland and the Aesthetics of Automation, on how the modern theme park popularized the rise of industrial automation in the post-war period, and Queer, Byzantine: Camp, Excess, Aesthetics on queer dialogues between the Byzantine past and modern art, architecture, literature, and popular culture.
Roland Betancourt
PhD, Yale University
Professor of Art History
Guggenheim Fellow, 2023-2024
University of California, Irvine
Art History Department