Jennifer Ball

Professor of Early Christian and Byzantine Art

Jennifer Ball’s interests are in textiles and dress, and portrait representations of dress. Much of her research also concerns textiles, and other material culture, as it moved around the Mediterranean, in the Byzantine, Islamic and Western medieval worlds. She is a frequent lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has held fellowships at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Princeton University’s Program in Hellenic Studies. She received the 2016-17 Claire Tow Distinguished Teacher Award at Brooklyn College. Her current projects take up Byzantine silk, Byzantine dress, and textiles and lived religion in Northeast Africa.

Publications:

• “Rich Interiors: The Remnant of a Hanging from Late Antique Egypt in the Collection of Dumbarton Oaks” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 73 (2019), 215-251.
• Contributing author, Byzantine and Early Islamic Textiles: An Online Scholarly Publication of the Dumbarton Oaks Textile Holdings. Gudrun Bühl and Elizabeth Dospĕl Williams, Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2019. https://www.doaks.org/resources/textiles/
• “Died in the Wool, Buried in the Linen: Textiles from the Graves of Late Antique Egypt” in From the Desert to the City: Textiles of Late Ancient Egypt, Warren Woodfin ed., 2018, 6-13.
• “Textiles: The Emergence of a Christian Identity in Cloth,” in The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art, Robin Jensen and Mark Ellison eds., London: Routledge 2018, 221-239.

• “The Lincoln Typikon: Group Identity and Social Structure in a Fourteenth-Century Convent” The Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies, Volume 5 (2016).
• “Saint Sabas and the Monks of the Holy Land” and catalogue entries in Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, Barbara Drake Boehm and Melanie Holcomb eds., New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016.
• “Charms: Protective and Auspicious Motifs,” in Designing Identities: Gender and Power in Late Antique Textiles, New York: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU, February 2016.
• Contributor. Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition. Edited by Helen C. Evans with Brandie Ratliffe. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012.
• “Decoding the Habit of the Byzantine Nun” in Journal of Modern Hellenism 27 (2009-10), 25-52.
• “The Missing Link: Filling the Gap in the Evolution of Medieval Domestic Looms” in Anayemata Evrtika: Early Christian, Byzantine and Armenian Studies in Honor of Thomas F. Mathews (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern GmBH, 2009), 38-44.
• “A Double-Headed Eagle Embroidery: From Battlefield to Altar,” in Metropolitan Museum Journal. 41 (2006), 59-64.
• “A Sixteenth-Century Batrashil in The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” in Hugoye: The Journal of Syriac Studies. 9:1(January, 2006). 
• Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth- to Twelfth-Century Painting. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
• Contributor, Byzantium: Faith and Power. Edited by Helen C. Evans. Metropolitan Museum of Art, March 18-July 4, 2004, NY: Metropolitan Museum/Abrams, 2004.