Jennifer Borland, PhD
Professor
Jennifer Borland is an art historian specializing in medieval art and architecture, and teaches courses in medieval European and Islamic art history as well as on gender in visual culture at OSU. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from Stanford University in 2006, and joined the OSU faculty in 2007. Borland’s research and teaching interests range from medieval medical and scientific imagery, to medievalism and collecting, materiality, the corporeal experience of objects and spaces, audience and reception, and representations of gender.
She recently published a new book with Pennsylvania State University Press, titled Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the
Régime du corps, which explores several illustrated copies of a late medieval health guide. She also
wrote a related article for The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization dedicated to sharing scholarly work with
the public;Medieval illustrated manuscripts reveal how upper-class women managed
healthy households
has had over 43,000 visits by readers.
Dr. Borland was recently named the first Director of the OSU Center for the Humanities. Read more about the new appointment here. Previously, she led other humanities-oriented initiatives on campus, including the Digital Humanities Initiative. She has served in a variety of other positions while at OSU, including as Interim Department Head, Associate Department Head, Director of Graduate Studies in Art History, and the College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Fellow for Community Engagement. She is a 2019 graduate of the HERS Institute, a higher education leadership development program.
She is a founding member of the Material Collective, a collaborative group that seeks to expand the form of and avenues for academic work, in part through prioritizing creativity, adventurousness, and activism in art historical research and writing. For more on the MC, see this interview in the Rutgers Art Review.
Book:
Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the Régime du corps (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022)
Related media:
Medieval illustrated manuscripts reveal how upper-class women managed healthy households, The Conversation (April 1, 2022)
Q&A with Jennifer Borland, author of Visualizing Household Health, Penn State University Press Blog (April 4, 2022)
Editorial Work:
General Editor (with Nancy Thompson), Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art, 2019 – present https://differentvisions.org/.
Awards:
She has been the recipient of awards from the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, the International Center for Medieval Art, the Kress Foundation, the Oklahoma Humanities Council, the University of Iowa Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, the University of Pennsylvania’s Humanities Forum, the Humanities Research Center at Rice University, the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund, and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (now the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research) at Stanford University. She recently received the Outstanding Achievement and Mentorship of Women Award from the Women’s Faculty Council at Oklahoma State University.
Publications:
“Female Networks and the Circulation of a Late Medieval Illustrated Health Guide,” in Moving Women, Moving Objects (400-1500), eds. Tracy Chapman Hamilton and Mariah Proctor-Tiffany (Brill, 2019), 108-136.
“A Medievalist in the Archives: Exploring Twentieth-Century Medievalism at Glencairn,"Glencairn Museum News, No. 1, 2019 (published 14 February 2019)
With Louise Siddons,
“Yay or Neigh? FredericRemington’sBronco Buster, Public Art, and Socially-Engaged Art History Pedagogy,” Art History Pedagogy & Practice 3.1 (2018).
“Moved by Medicine: The Multisensory Experience of Handling Folding Almanacs,” in Sensory Reflections: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts, eds. Fiona Griffiths and Kathryn Starkey (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), 203-224, plates 280-282.
With Martha Easton, “Integrated Pasts: Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle,” Gesta 57.1 (April 2018): 95-118.
With Karen Overbey, “Diagnostic Performance and Diagrammatic Manipulation in the Physician’s Folding Almanacs,” in The Agency of Things in Medieval and Early Modern Art: Materials, Power and Manipulation, eds. Grażyna Jurkowlaniec, Ika Matyjaszkiewicz, and Zuzanna Sarnecka (Routledge, 2018), 144-156.
With Louise Siddons,"From Hoarders to the Hoard: Giving Disciplinary Legitimacy to Undisciplined Collecting"in postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 7.3 (2016): 407-420.
“Freeze-framed: theorizing the historiated initials of the Régime du corps,” Word & Image 32.2 (April-June 2016) 235-250“
Unruly Reading: The Consuming Role of Touch in the Experience of a Medieval Manuscript"in Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts, edited by Jonathan Wilcox (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 97-114, plates 225-230
“Encountering the Inauthentic” in Transparent Things: A Cabinet, ed. Karen Eileen Overbey and Maggie M. Williams (New York: punctum books, 2013), 17-38
“Artistic Representation: Women and/in Medieval Visual Culture,” with Marian Bleeke, Rachel Dressler, Martha Easton, and Elizabeth L’Estrange, in A Cultural History of Women, vol. 2 of 6 (In the Middle Ages), volume ed. Kim M. Phillips (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 179-213 (267-271)
“Violence on Vellum: Saint Margaret’s Transgressive Body and Its Audience,” in Representing Medieval Genders and Sexualities in Europe: Construction, Transformation, and Subversion, 600–1530, eds. Elizabeth L’Estrange and Alison More (Ashgate, 2011), 67-88
“Audience and Spatial Experience in the Nuns’ Church at Clonmacnoise,” in Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives in Medieval Art (2011), 1-45
“The Forested Frontier: Commentary in the Margins of the Alhambra Ceiling Paintings” in Medieval Encounters 14.3 (Dec. 2008), 303-340
"The Immediacy of Objects: Reassessing the Contribution of Art History in Feminist Medieval Studies"in Medieval Feminist Forum (44.2, Dec. 2008), 53-73.