Professor Kahn smiling in front of landscaping of the Mount Auburn cemetery.

Associate Professor; Medieval Art, Chair; HAA Diversity & Inclusion Committee, Faculty Advisor; Sequitur

she/her/hers

Email Office Hours
debkahn@bu.edu Fall 2024 Office Hours – TBA

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Deborah Kahn (Associate Professor) is a specialist in European art and architecture of the Middle Ages with special interests in the historical context of monumental stone sculpture, its iconography and the transmission of images. Her new book The Politics of Sanctity (Brepols, 2021) focuses on recently identified sculptures from around the year 1000 that depict the manufacture a new saint in conjunction with images of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim sentiment.

She did graduate work at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and subsequently served as a consultant on sculpture and conservation at Canterbury and Lincoln Cathedrals and as an organizer of the exhibition, English Romanesque Art 1066-1200. She is the author of numerous articles, as well as two books Canterbury Cathedral and its Romanesque Sculpture (1991) and The Romanesque Frieze and its Spectator (editor, 1992).

Professor Kahn serves on the advisory board of the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in the British Isles and on other international committees. She chairs the department’s Diversity & Inclusion committee, serves as faculty advisor to the editors of Sequitur, and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in London. Her current research relates to the models and transmission of the imagery of the Bayeux Tapestry. She offers a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses on medieval art and architecture – including a seminar on the Bayeux Tapestry and its Context.

Curriculum Vitae


Selected Publications

The Politics of Sanctity. Selles-sur-Cher and its Sculpture. 
Turnhout, Brepols, 2021.
The Engoulant: Development, Symbolic Meaning and Wit,
Melanges Offertes a Eliane Vergnolle, Ex quadris lapidibus.
La pierre dans l’art médiéval, éditions. ed Y. Gallet.
Brepols: Société française d’archéologie, 2012.