Brooke Wrubel

Brooke Wrubel is a third-year PhD student specializing in Early Christian, Byzantine, and Western Medieval Art, with a focus on Italy and its active participation within global networks of exchange. She seeks to investigate the ways in which materials and techniques used to craft objects can serve as evidence of cross-cultural interactions. Her research also engages with the complex processes and metaphors of imprinting, replication, and imitation. She has a particular interest in studying pilgrimage souvenirs and reliquaries, both of which informed her qualifying paper for the Columbia MA: “Multiplicity Matters: The Coalescence of Place(s) and Time(s) in the San Sebastiano Reliquary Panel.” While at Columbia, she has contributed to the APAHA excavation efforts at Villa Adriana in 2024 and 2025. 

Brooke holds a BA in Art History and Italian Studies from Bowdoin College (2021) and an MA in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania (2023). Her MA thesis “Intermediality in Duccio’s Maestà: Cosmati Work, Textiles, and Enamels” explores cross-medial dialogues between painted objects and their crafted referents. Her publications include catalogue entries in New Views of the Middle Ages: Highlights from the Wyvern Collection (Scala, 2020), as well as a biographical essay and catalogue entries in Antiquity and America: The Ancient Mediterranean in the United States (Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2022).