Dr. Dana Katz 2017-2018
Dr. Katz received her Ph.D. for her thesis on twelfth-century secular architecture in Norman Sicily in the Department of History of Art at the University of Toronto. Her extensive doctoral research in Palermo was supported by a Fulbright Award and a Samuel H. Kress Travel Fellowship. Further research areas include Crusader Jerusalem and the formation of medieval and Islamic art collections in Western Europe. Recent published work is on the exhibition of Islamic art in the nineteenth-century Museo Nazionale in Palermo, published in the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz.
During her time as a post-doctoral fellow at the HCMH, she will be preparing a manuscript on the royal parklands outside the medieval city of Palermo. A lost landscape of the medieval Mediterranean, the scope of the project includes a study of the relationship between the built environment and its surroundings as well as sources of water. Other work pursued at the Center is on the geographer al-Idrisi’s geographical treatise completed in the Norman court in Palermo known as the Tabula Rogeriana. A shorter study is a reinterpretation of the circumstances around the creation of Peter of Eboli’s epic poem, Liber ad honorem Augusti sive de rebus Siculis.