Dr Ioanna Rapti
Newton Fellow
Tel +44 (0)20 7848 2515
Email ioanna.rapti@kcl.ac.uk
Address Centre for Hellenic Studies & Department of Classics
D8, North Wing
King's College London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS
Research interests
– Armenian and Eastern Christian art
– Manuscript production and illumination in Eastern Mediterranean
– The Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia and its cultural interactions with the Christian and Islamic world
Biography
After MA studies in Archeology at the University of Ioannina, Greece, I specialized in medieval Armenian art and obtained my PhD from the École Pratique des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne with a dissertation on Armenian Book Production and Illumination in Genoese Crimea, 14th-15th centuries. I continued my research on various aspects of manuscript illumination investigating issues of liturgical imagery, text and image relation, patronage and history of manuscripts. My interest on Armenian Cilicia expanded to the material culture, architecture and topography of this area and led me to the current project. This aims to a comprehensive historical geography of Armenian Cilicia during the Crusades comprising a prosopographical database and a record of surviving monuments.
I have also co-curated the exhibitions Armenia Sacra and Sainte Russie at the Louvre, taught at the Universities of Aix-en-Provence and Grenoble, worked at the National Library in Paris on databases of illustrated French incunabula and early printed Parisian editions, and at the Byzantine Library in Paris on the archives of Thomas Whittemore.