Department of Art History & Archaeology
4227 Art/Sociology Building
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-1335
(301) 405-0032
Email: sg113@umail.umd.edu
Publications

Professor Sharon Gerstel (A.B. Bryn Mawr College; M.A., Ph.D. New York University) specializes in Byzantine art and archaeology. As an art historian, her research focuses on the complex relationship between liturgical and extra-liturgical ceremony and monumental painting of medieval Byzantium (publications). Her first book, Beholding the Sacred Mysteries: Programs of the Byzantine Sanctuary, was published by the University of Washington Press as a College Art Association Monograph on the Fine Arts. She is currently at work on a book entitled Painting the Sacred House, a study of art and family ritual in village churches of rural Byzantium. For this project she has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship. Gerstel contributed to and edited a comprehensive study of Byzantine polychrome tiles from the tenth and eleventh centuries, entitled A Lost Art Rediscovered: The Architectural Ceramics of Byzantium (Penn State University Press, 2001).

As an archaeologist, Gerstel has worked at numerous Early Christian and Byzantine sites in Greece, including Dion and Corinth. She has published on the history of medieval Messenia and has written on Byzantine and Turkish pottery recovered from an intensive surface survey in that region. She currently serves as Co-Director of fieldwork for excavations at Panakton, Boeotia, an ancient site covered by a medieval village of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century. Excavation of this site was awarded a 1999 Dumbarton Oaks Project Grant as well as funding from the 1984 Foundation. A major report on this site was recently published in Hesperia 72.2 (2003) under the title “A Late Medieval Settlement at Panakton.”

As a professor at the University of Maryland, Gerstel has been nominated numerous times for teaching awards from the Panhellenic Association and the College Park Association of Parents. Gerstel currently serves as director of undergraduate studies.