Fotini Kondyli

NEH Horace W. Goldsmith Distinguished Teaching Professor, Art History


 

Fotini Kondyli is Associate Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology. Her research interests include Byzantine and Frankish spatial practices, community building processes and the material culture of Byzantine non-elites. She also works on cultural, economic, and political networks in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Byzantine period (13th- 15th c.). She is the author of Rural Communities in Late Byzantium, Resilience and Vulnerability in the Northern Aegean (2022) and coeditor of The Byzantine Neighbourhood. Urban Space and Political Action (2022).

 

As an active field archaeologist, Kondyli has worked in numerous archaeological sites in Greece, Albania, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Germany. She is currently involved in archaeological projects at Athens, Thebes, northern Attica, and Samothrace. Her fieldwork at Athens and Thebes are part of her new research project on Byzantine city-making processes and the role of non-elites as city-makers. Bringing together legacy data from old excavations and newly excavated sites, Kondyli works on reconstructing parts of Athens and Thebes' spatial layout and architecture in the Middle and Late Byzantine/Frankish periods and explore the variety of activities and lived experiences in these cities. She is also employing 3D modelling and Virtual Reality tools to visualize the cities’ changes through time and communicate her research results to a wider audience in new and interactive ways.

 

Kondyli has held fellowships at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (Junior Fellow 2008-2009; Summer Fellow 2016) and at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Old World at Brown University (2012-2014). She has also been the recipient of the American Institute for Archaeology Colburn Fellowship (2014-2015), an NEH research fellowship (2018) and she is currently named NEH Horace W. Goldsmith Distinguished Teaching Professor for 2021-23.

 

At UVA, Kondyli teaches courses on Late Antique and Byzantine art and material culture, on household archaeology, on pre-modern urbanism and sacred landscapes as well as on cross-cultural artistic and economic interaction in the Medieval Mediterranean. She also routinely takes students with her in the field and involve select students in her research.