Cynthia Hahn
Professor of Art History / Medieval Art

Cynthia Hahn teaches early and late medieval art at Hunter College and The Graduate Center. Her courses focus on issues of production and meaning for both medieval and contemporary makers and audiences. She has published on material from the early Christian period to the Gothic, from across Europe--Italy to England to the Byzantine East. Her work has appeared in Art History, Art Bulletin, Gesta, Speculum, and many other journals and collections. Her books include a study on the Hannover manuscript of the lives of saints Kilian and Margaret published by Graz, and Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of the Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century, University of California Press, 2001.She has served on the boards of the ICMA, CASVA, and CAA online reviews, where she has also been an editor.

Hahn earned her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University and her MA from the University of Chicago. She has previously held teaching positions at Florida State University where she was Gulnar K. Bosch professor of Art History, the University of Chicago, the University of Delaware and the University of Michigan. Currently, Hahn’s projects include a book-length essay on reliquaries from early Christianity to the Sack of 1204. That study began with her work on arm reliquaries ("The Voices of the Saints, What Do Speaking Reliquaries Say?" Gesta, 36, 1997.) and has grown into an examination of the art historical issues surrounding relics and reliquaries. The work has been supported by residences at the Institute for Advanced Study and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. In line with these interests, she has recently been invited to participate in the planning of a major exhibition for 2010 “A Matter of Faith: Relics and Reliquaries in the Middle Ages” at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.