Ph.D. alumnus Kyle G. Sweeney '17 will join Winthrop University this fall as a tenure-track assistant professor of art history. Dr. Sweeney’s research focuses on the social, spatial, and ritual fabric of late medieval cities. At Winthrop, a highly ranked, public comprehensive university in South Carolina, he will teach a variety of courses on medieval and Islamic art and architectural history as well as special topics courses related to cultural heritage and digital humanities.
After completing his Ph.D. in art history under the direction of Professor Linda Neagley, Kyle joined the Humanities Research Center (HRC) at Rice as a postdoctoral fellow in spatial humanities. He recently published an anthology chapter in The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture (Routledge, 2019) and is working on a book project tentatively entitled Fancying Gothic: Architecture and Society in Late Medieval Normandy. As an instructor and teaching fellow in the Rice Program in Writing and Communication (PWC), Dr. Sweeney developed and taught two new first-year writing-intensive seminars on medieval cities and pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. He also co-taught an upper-level spatial humanities design studio entitled “Space/Time/Travel, 1400-1700” in which students learned how to visualize historical itinerancies using ArcGIS software. Over the summer, he will conduct extensive fieldwork in southern France to help launch traveLog, a new digital platform for mapping historical itinerancies in development at the HRC.
[Image: Kyle ascending the lantern tower of the parish church of Notre-Dame de Louviers (photo: Lindsey Hansen)]