Brooke Wrubel

Brooke Wrubel is a PhD candidate specializing in Early Christian, Byzantine, and Western Medieval Art, with a focus on the development of pilgrimage shrines across Italy, Greece, and the Holy Land. She investigates how encounters with saints and sacred objects are informed by architecture, monumental programs, and portable souvenirs. She is particularly interested in how mold-made, serially-produced badges, medallions, and ampullae meaningfully shape pilgrims’ experiences. As such, her work engages with the artistic processes and metaphors of imprinting, replication, and imitation. Brooke contributed to the APAHA excavation efforts at Villa Adriana in 2024, 2025, and 2026, developing archaeological modes of thinking that she applies to her methodological framework. Her dissertation research has been supported by a PHI Casa Muraro Summer Research Fellowship.

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).