Jacqueline Jung

B.A., University of Michigan, 1993
1991-1992: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich
Ph.D., Columbia University, 2002

Jacqueline Jung specializes in the art and architecture of medieval Europe, with an emphasis on the figural arts of Gothic France and Germany. My teaching encompasses the history of medieval sculpture; Gothic cathedrals; the body as subject and medium in the Middle Ages; monumental narrative arts; late medieval altarpieces; visions and visionary experiences; the portrayal and provocation of emotions in medieval art; and approaches to race and racialized representations in medieval European art. I regularly teach a 100-level course introducing students to sacred art and architecture in various world cultures, from the pyramids of Egypt to the World Trade Center Memorial in Manhattan.

My recent book, Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture (Yale University Press, 2020), recipient of the Karen Gould Prize in Art History from the Medieval Academy of America, offers new ways of looking at monumental sculptural arts in medieval Germany and France, exploring the diverse facets of sensory, physical, and affective experience they suggest and provoke. My first book, The Gothic Screen: Sculpture, Space, and Community in French and German Cathedrals, ca. 1200-1400 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), examined the ways in which the lavishly decorated partitions inside Gothic buildings served not only to create discrete liturgical zones but also to connect lay and clerical audiences around a shared focal point. Forthcoming articles address Gothic cathedrals as instantiations of what later writers would term “the sublime”; the importance of the viewer’s physical perspective in the design of early Netherlandish carved altarpieces; glimmers of women’s agency in didactic and hagiographical manuscript illuminations; and the impact of my teacher Caroline Walker Bynum on the field of medieval art history. A new book, which I am co-writing with Isaac Jean-François (PhD candidate in American and African-American Studies) based on a class we taught on the topic, explores the many surprising resonances in approaches to bodies, senses, and figuration in medieval European and contemporary Black arts and aesthetics.  

In my own scholarship German art historical writings have been essential; there are many areas of art historical inquiry in my field that one cannot study without reading knowledge of this language. (Students who might be interested in working with me, take note!) I have translated several art-historical studies from German, most notably Aloïs Riegl’s Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts (Zone, 2004; paperback edition released in March 2021). The history of Art History remains of special interest to me, particularly the mediating role of photography, and the ways that nationalistic politics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped how medieval European art has been understood up to the present. We can only apprehend the medieval through the filter of the modern, and attending to the sometimes overt and sometimes subtle ways in which these domains seep into one another is one of the most exciting aspects of research in this field.

Although my own research has centered on Gothic arts in northern Europe, my graduate advising has covered wider terrain. I’ve advised (or co-advised) completed dissertations on German Romanesque portal sculptures and questions of law (Stephanie Luther, 2015); the symbolism and materiality of wood in late medieval altarpieces (Gregory Bryda, 2016); the links among late medieval reliquaries, automata, and puppets (Michelle Oing, 2020); sculpted Deposition Groups in Spain and Italy (Anabelle Gambert-Jouan, 2023); and historiated wooden doors at sites across Europe (Katherine Werwie, 2024). Dissertations are underway on performance and authorship in the Manesse Songbook (Dennis Lyle Dechant); speech and inscriptions in the textiles and wall-paintings of late medieval German convents (Kristen Herdman); and the material and devotional agency of double-sided painted processional crucifixes in Italian Dominican churches (Stephanie Wisowaty, a project I’m co-advising with Lawrence Kanter).

As the field of medieval art history (and, on a microscale, my own teaching trajectory) evolves, I look forward to continuing to work with students both within Europe and across the vast geographical and cultural terrains of the medieval world. I’m especially eager to work with people who bring new questions and perspectives to familiar materials, those who are driven to explore areas of medieval art that have fallen between the cracks, and those who explore the affinities, connections, and tensions between the arts of medieval Christian Europe and those beyond its boundaries. The field of medieval art history looks very different today than when I entered graduate school. As a musician friend likes to say, “Play it weird.” So, prospective students: surprise me. Let’s build something new, together.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS (more on my Academia page)

“Unruly Gothic,” in Lateness and Modernity in Medieval Architecture, ed. Alice Isabella Sullivan and Kyle G. Sweeney (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023), 423-46.

“Walking to Heaven in Gothic Sculpture,” in Kunstgeschichte(n): Festschrift für Stephan Albrecht, ed. Katharina Christa Schüppel und Magdalena Tebel (Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2023), 12-26.

“In Praise of the Pigeon: Interpretive Adventures at Naumburg Cathedral,” in How Do Images Work? Strategies of Visual Communication in Medieval Art, ed. Christine Beier, Tim Juckes, and Assaf Pinkus (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), 149-64.

“Gothic Sculpture in France and Beyond,” in Willibald Sauerländer und die Kunstgeschichte, ed. Franz Hefele and Ulrich Pfisterer (Passau: Klinger, 2022), 55-87.

“The Work of Gothic Sculpture in the Age of its Photographic Reproduction,” in The Lives and Afterlives of Medieval Iconography, ed. Pamela A. Patton and Henry D. Schilb (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021), 161-94.

“The Strangeness of Crucifixes,” in Christ on the Cross: The Boston Crucifix and the Rise of Monumental Wood Sculpture, 970-1200,, ed. Shirin Fozi and Gerhard Lutz (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 406-19.