Iris Péron-Ames

Iris Péron-Ames works on the semiotics of space and enclosure in the art and architecture of medieval Europe with a focus on enshrinement and landscape. She considers the Gothic garden as frame and sacred visual, as a reconfiguration of temporalities and geographies, as interpolating incompatible existences, and as mediating the profane, the sacred, and the corporeal. Throughout her research, she explores containment in its delimitation and activation of space. 

Prior to coming to Yale, Iris received her BA in Art History (with Honors) and Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania in 2026. Her senior thesis, entitled, “Diana in the Garden: Image and Transgression in the Roman Hortus,” interrogated the Roman garden as a stage for liminal and mythic encounters. Looking to the peristyle garden of the House of the Menander in Pompeii, she suggests that the pendant apses of Venus and Diana and Actaeon cannot be divorced from the conceptual space of the garden. They enact the range of human interactions with nature, as well the instability and metamorphic fluidity of the garden’s edges. She received the David M. Robb Thesis Prize in Art History and the Rose Award for her honors research. That same year, Iris also received the Stallybrass Prize in the History of Material Texts for her paper, “Enshrining and Enfleshing the Word: The Shrine of the Cathach.” 

While at the University of Pennsylvania, Iris worked with the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In 2025, she co-curated and contributed to the temporary exhibition, “Into the Blue,” an archaeological exploration of blue pigments and colorants across history. She has also worked as project assistant for the Books in Renaissance Art database, for which she documented trends in bookbinding, use, and representation through the analysis of medieval and early modern depictions of books.