Claire Dillon
Claire studies the intersections of visual cultures, identities, and faiths in the medieval Mediterranean. Her dissertation examines silk textile production in Sicily, involving hundreds of fragments attributed—or misattributed—to Muslim weavers working on the island. By critically examining the historiographies of this material, she considers how modern perceptions of diversity in the medieval Mediterranean have transformed over time. Her other projects investigate the afterlives of medieval Mediterraneanisms as manifest in modern extremisms, histories of fashion, and neomedieval monuments. She is currently revising her research on the Cathedral of Mogadishu (a twentieth-century rendition of the twelfth-century cathedral of Cefalù) for publication in two forthcoming articles.
She is the recipient of the 2025 Paul Mellon Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome and the inaugural fellowship of the International Interfaith Research Lab at Teachers College. Her research has also been supported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, SSRC-Mellon Mays, and Packard Humanities Institute, among other grantors, while her work on extremist appropriations of the Middle Ages has received grants and fellowships from the Medieval Academy of America and RaceB4Race, as well as Columbia’s Society of Fellows/Heyman Center, Lehman Center Public History Project, and Department of History. Her research has included participation in workshops and seminars with the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Harvard Art Museums, Dumbarton Oaks, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Center for Curatorial Leadership, Textile Museum, Centre International d'Études des Textiles Anciens, Early Textiles Study Group, and the Center for Science & Society.
Claire is the Program Manager of Avinoam Shalem and Alina Payne’s “Black Mediterranean” Connecting Art Histories Initiative, and she was formerly Rapporteur of the Public Humanities University Seminar and a consultant and fellow at the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning. She also contributed to digital humanities projects as a member of the NEH Immersive Global Middle Ages Institute and as a research assistant for the Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments project. Her commitment to art and advocacy includes serving organizations such as Amnesty International, the United Nations Headquarters, UNESCO, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
She earned her M.Phil. in Medieval Language, Literature and Culture from Trinity College Dublin as a Mitchell Scholar, and a B.A. in art history and Italian from Northwestern University, where she studied contemporary art as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. Prior to her graduate studies, she was Director of Education and Outreach of the nonprofit ART WORKS Projects, where she developed and contributed to photography exhibitions, film productions, and educational programming across Europe, Africa, and the Americas to amplify diverse social justice issues in collaboration with local communities.
Recent conference papers and invited lectures:
“Lost in Translation: Misread Arabic and other misadventures in the modern histories of medieval silk,” Mary Ausplund Tooze Endowed Visiting Professor of Islamic + Ancient Art Invited Lecture, Portland State University, 2024.
“Making the Medieval Modern: The colonial past and digital future of the Cathedral of Mogadishu,” Invited lecture, Grambling State University, 2024.
“Expanding Mare Nostrum to the Indian Ocean: Antonio Vandone’s arabo-normanna Cathedral of Mogadishu,” Conference paper, The Red Corridor and the Wider Mediterranean: Histories of Global Commercial Desires and Image Making, I Tatti - Harvard University; Columbia University, 2024.
“A Global Mediterranean? Tracing the fragmented histories of silk in medieval Sicily,” Conference paper, Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting, University of Notre Dame, 2024.
“Power Play: Manipulating the Medieval Mediterranean in the Colonial Cathedral of Mogadishu,” Conference Paper, International Society for the Study of Medievalism Conference, Montclair State University; Seton Hall University, 2024.