Books
- Duke University Press · 2027Amusement, Inc.Roland Betancourt
Amusement, Inc.in press
Disneyland’s Corporate Apparatus and the Making of the Theme Park
The second of two books on Disneyland. Where Disneyland and the Rise of Automation followed the machines, Amusement, Inc. follows the corporation: the research-and-development apparatus, the industrial partners, and the management thinking that turned a Cold War company’s ideas about operations into a new kind of place, the theme park.
Disneyland and the Rise of Automation
How Technology Created the Happiest Place on Earth
The story of how the modern theme park was built out of the machines, the methods, and the anxieties of postwar automation. From Walt Disney’s 1948 visit to Ford’s River Rouge plant to the animatronic hosts of the 1960s, the book follows the technologies behind the rides and the ways Americans learned to love, fear, and live with thinking machines.
The Secrets We Keep
Hidden Histories of the Byzantine Empire
A short book on secrecy in the Byzantine Empire, from the relics of the imperial palace to the recipe for Greek fire, and on what secrets do to history: how visual evidence conceals as much as it reveals, how to work from fragments, and what the historian owes the people the record left out, queer and trans lives among them. Based on the Getty Research Institute Council Lecture.
Performing the Gospels in Byzantium
Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy
How the Gospel book was seen, heard, and handled in the Byzantine liturgy. The book follows the Gospel text from script to illustration to recitation, reading the marginalia and miniatures of eleventh-century lectionaries as responses to how the text was read aloud and imagined by listeners, inside the acoustic spaces of the Middle Byzantine church.
Byzantine Intersectionality
Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages
Sexuality, gender, and race in the Byzantine Empire, read through its art, literature, theology, law, and medicine: consent in images of the Virgin, the sexual shaming of the empress Theodora, the lives of transgender monks, same-gender desire in depictions of Doubting Thomas, and the figure of the Ethiopian Eunuch. A book about the people who do not appear in the official story, and what the sources say when they are allowed to speak for themselves.
Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium
A history of how Byzantine writers understood seeing, touching, and imagining. Surveying classical, late antique, and medieval theories of vision, the book argues that the tactile language Byzantines used for sight described the mind’s grasp of what the senses delivered, and shows what that theory of perception meant for the making and viewing of images, and for the image as a site of desire for the Divine.
Edited volumes and journal issues
- Byzantine Fantasies of Art after the Empirein presseditor (National Gallery of Art, 2028)
- Byzantine Materialityco-editor with Evan Freeman, Sense, Matter, and Medium series (De Gruyter, 2024)
- Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernityco-editor with Maria Taroutina, Visualising the Middle Ages series (Brill, 2015)
- Medieval Academy of America Centennial Special Issue: “Medieval Studies and Its Institutions,” Speculum 100:1co-editor with Karla Mallette (2025)
- “Imagined Encounters: Historiographies for a New World,” postmedieval 7:1editor (2016)
- “The Medium before Modernism,” West 86th 23:2editor (2016)