Robert Nelson studies and teaches medieval art, mainly in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the history and methods of art history. He was the co-curator of Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2006-2007. His book, Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950, 2004, asks how the cathedral of Constantinople, once ignored or despised, came to be regarded as one of the great monuments of world architecture. It works with varieties of evidence pertaining to the history of Istanbul, medieval revival architecture, and the communities that supported and benefited from the study of Byzantium. Articles in press investigate Venetian reaction to Byzantine sculpture, Byzantium and the classical tradition, and the relationship of art history and anthropology. His current project involves the social lives of illuminated Greek manuscripts in Byzantium and their reception in Renaissance Italy.

Selected Publications
Hagia Sophia 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Later Byzantine Painting: Art, Agency, and Appreciation, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Variorum, 2007).

Editor, Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, New York, 2000.

Co-Editor with Richard Shiff, Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Co-Editor with Margaret Olin, Monument and Memory Made and Unmade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Co-Editor with Kristen Collins, Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006).

“The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art History in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry, 26 (Spring 2000), 414-434.

 “Heavenly Allies at the Chora,” Gesta 43 (2004), 31-40.

“Letters and Language/Ornament and Identity in Byzantium and Islam,” in The Experience of Islamic Art on the Margins of Islam, ed. Irene A. Bierman, Reading, 2005, 61-88.

 “Image and Inscription: Pleas for Salvation in Spaces of Devotion,” Art and Text in Byzantine Culture, ed. Elizabeth James, New York, 2007.

“High Justice:  Venice, San Marco, and the Spoils of 1204,” in Panayotis L. Vocotopoulos, ed., Byzantine Art in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade: The Fourth Crusade and its Consequences (Athens, 2007), 143-151.

“Byzantine Icons in Genoa before the Mandylion,” Intorno al Sacro Volto. Genova, Bisanzio e il Mediterraneo (secoli XI-XV), Florence, 2007, 89-102.

 “Empathetic Vision: Looking at and with a Performative Byzantine Miniature,” Art History 30 (2007), 489-502.

“The Art Collecting of Emily Crane Chadbourne and the Absence of Byzantine Art in Chicago,” To Inspire and Instruct: A History of Medieval Art in Midwestern Museums, edited by Christina Nielsen, Newcastle, 2008, 131-148.