About Kathryn Dickason
Los Angeles, California
Kathryn Dickason (CBA ’22) is a Public Relations and Communications Specialist at Simmons
University whose academic work focuses on Western medieval Christianity. She has published
numerous articles on medieval dance, contemporary ecstatic dance, religion, performance,
iconography, gender, Dante, and sign theory. She holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from
Stanford University and was a postdoctoral fellow and visiting scholar at the University of
Southern California. Her first book, Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became
Sacred, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. Currently she is writing her second
book on medieval dance iconography and has started a third book project on ballet medievalism.
Wheeling Incarnation: Medieval Dance in the Visual Arts
At CBA, Kathryn Dickason pursued her second book, a study on medieval dance iconography
tentatively entitled Wheeling Incarnation: Medieval Dance in the Visual Arts. Based largely on
illustrated manuscripts, altar paintings, sculpture, and decorative objects from American and
European collections, this project may be the first comprehensive study of medieval dance
imagery in the English language. The book project analyzes how works of art depicting
Christian, as well as Jewish, Muslim, and polytheistic dancers, visualized and encoded ritual,
recreation, and revelation. Also at CBA, Dickason began guest editing a special issue of
postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies entitled “Legacies of Medieval Dance,”
and conducted additional scholarship exploring medieval European dance from the perspectives of enchantment, race, and colonization.
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