About

Roland Betancourt is Chancellor’s Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, he recently completed a two-year term as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and held the Dilworth Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

He is the author of five books, including Disneyland and the Rise of Automation (Princeton, 2026) and Byzantine Intersectionality (Princeton, 2020), winner of the Medieval Academy of America’s Singerman Prize, with Amusement, Inc. coming from Duke University Press in March 2027. His writing has appeared in TIME, The Washington Post, Fortune, Smithsonian, and Scientific American.

He holds a PhD from Yale and a BA, summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania. He is Vice President of the International Center of Medieval Art, series editor of ICMA Books | Viewpoints at Penn State Press, and has served on the boards of the College Art Association, the Medieval Academy of America, and the National Committee for the History of Art. At the University of California, Irvine, he teaches “Disneyland: Art, Architecture, and Operation,” a graduate seminar on art and automation, “Theme Parks,” and a travel seminar, “Learning from Las Vegas.”

A first-generation Cuban American from Miami, he speaks Spanish natively and lives in Los Angeles.