Dana Katz

Universität Hamburg (Germany)

Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation

A lost Mediterranean landscape: parklands and palaces of medieval Sicily

2023–2024: Fall and Spring

Dana Katz is an art and architectural historian specializing in the material culture of the medieval Mediterranean. She received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her PhD from the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto.

She was a Senior Research Fellow at Universität Hamburg’s German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded Center for Advanced Study, “RomanIslam - Center for Comparative Empire and Transcultural Studies,” in addition to holding a François Chevalier Fellowship at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study (MIAS), Casa de Velázquez/Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2022–23. Previously, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City in 2021–22. She has also been a postdoctoral fellow at the Haifa Center for Mediterranean History (HCMH) at the University of Haifa and held a Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, supervised by the late Prof. Ronnie Ellenblum.

Her research has been supported by the Fulbright, Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the Medieval Academy of America (Olivia Remie Constable Award, 2021), the American Philosophical Society (Franklin Research Grant, 2023) and the Getty Research Institute (Library Research Grant, 2023). In the past, she has participated in international seminars of the Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max Planck Institute for Art History and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, funded by the Getty.

At the Italian Academy, Katz is completing a book on a historical landscape in the medieval Mediterranean: the royal parklands of the twelfth-century Norman kings of Sicily. The monograph considers the interplay of the three connected elements of landscape, architecture, and interfaith relations in a pre-modern hegemonic society. In addition to medieval Sicily, her research interests and publications encompass Islamic art and architecture, medieval archaeology, urban transformation of Mediterranean cities, Crusader art, and the modern formation of Islamic and medieval art collections.