NANCY WICKER, PH.D.
Distinguished PROFESSOR OF ART AND ART HISTORY
I am an art historian and archaeologist, and my interdisciplinary research focuses on the art of Scandinavia during the Early Medieval Period, from the Migration Period of the 5th and 6th centuries through the Viking Age, c. 750–1100. I have co-edited three books on gender and archaeology, including Situating Gender in European Archaeologies (2010), and I have also published on female infanticide during the Viking Age. Currently I am investigating patrons and clients who sponsored or purchased Viking art, artists and artisans who made the works, women and men who used and viewed the objects, and also the humans and anthropomorphic deities who were the subjects depicted in Viking-Age art. I have been a Visiting Professor at Uppsala University and I am the first woman elected to foreign membership in the Philosophical-historical Section of the Royal Society of Humanities at Uppsala, Sweden. I am also the first (and only) American chosen for membership in the Sachsensymposion, an international archaeological society. My research has been supported by fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, as well as grants from several American and Scandinavian funding agencies. Currently I am a Co-Chair of the international working party, Archaeology of Gender in Europe, and I serve on the Editorial Board for Gesta, the journal of the International Center of Medieval Art. I am a co-director of Project Andvari, an international collaborative project supported by two Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The goal of this project is to create a free digital portal that will provide online integrated access to dispersed collections of early medieval (4th–12th centuries) artifacts of northern Europe.
Gender Studies -Related Research Interests: Gender in European archaeology, Infanticide world-wide, Representations of women in ancient and medieval art
