Dana Katz is an art and architectural historian specializing in the material culture of the medieval Mediterranean. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Toronto. She has also been a researcher at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, and the New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Bard Graduate Center, the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Hamburg’s DFG-funded RomanIslam Center, and Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies. Katz is an assistant editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture.

Her research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, the Getty Research Library, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the Medieval Academy of America, the Fulbright Program, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Her first monograph, on secular architecture in medieval Sicily, is titled Courtly Ecologies in an Earthly Paradise: The Royal Parklands and Palaces of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily. Other research focuses on Islamic art and architecture, transformations of urban environments, and the modern formation of Islamic and medieval art collections.

At SCAS, she is completing her second book, on the reception and conceptions of the classical past in the medieval Western Mediterranean, among its later inhabitants. The monograph’s main themes are the ruined landscape, the historicity and materiality of objects, and pre-modern conceptions of antiquarianism and temporality. The primary lens of consideration for this comparative project, which explores medieval memory culture in the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Mediterranean, is the transcultural.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2025-26.