Meredith Cohen is Associate Professor of Art History at UCLA, where she has taught since 2011. She specializes in the history of architecture and urban development of Western Europe from c. 1000 to c. 1450, with a focus on that associated with France.

Her research methods range from documentary analysis and buildings archaeology to digital reconstruction, and her interests include the production, use, and reception of architecture and urban spaces, as well as cultural heritage and historiography.

Professor Cohen’s first monograph, The Sainte-Chapelle and the Construction of Sacral Monarchy: Royal Architecture in Thirteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge University Press, 2015) received the Society of Architectural Historians’ Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award in 2017. She has spearheaded anthologies on the subjects of memory, space, as well as difference and identity, and has published essays and articles in journals including JSAH, Speculum, and Res. In 2010, she co-curated an exhibition on medieval Paris at the Musée national du Moyen-Âge—Thermes de Cluny, titled Paris, ville rayonnante (“Paris, Rayonnant City”) (ed. RMN, 2010). In 2003, she founded, with Danielle Johnson, the International Medieval Society of Paris, a non-profit association that brings international and French scholars of the Middle Ages together in Paris for apéritifs, study days, and symposia.

Her current research project, titled Paris Past and Present, aims to digitally reconstruct selected lost monuments of Paris, c. 1100-1450 in 3D, an enterprise that brings together undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and international collaborators. The project comprises a core-research group, a seminar titled Digital Gothic, and summer workshops in Paris and at UCLA. The team has completed a series of monuments from thirteenth-century Paris, including an archaeologically accurate digital reconstruction of the thirteenth‑century Lady Chapel of Saint-Germain des Prés. Currently the team is reconstructing the architectural phases of the parish church of Saint‑Jacques de la Boucherie, whose sixteenth‑century tower, the Tour Saint-Jacques, still exists as a landmark in Paris. The project has been generously funded by UCLA as well as the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. To view this project, click here.

Education

Ph.D. Columbia University, 2004

Books

Courses

SELECTED COURSES TAUGHT, UNDERGRADUATE

  • AH 21 Medieval Art: Early Christian, Byzantine, Islamic, Carolingian, Ottoman, Romanesque, and Gothic art and architecture.
  • AH 115C Romanesque Art and Architecture
  • AH 115D Gothic Art and Architecture
  • AH 115E Late Gothic Art and Architecture: Art and architecture of Europe in 14th and early 15th centuries.
  • AH C115F Medieval Paris: Material culture, art, architecture, and history of city of Paris to circa 1500.
  • AH C117B Digital Gothic
  • AH 117C Selected Topics: The Medieval Bestiary, Digital Gothic, the Sainte-Chapelle
  • Paris Past and Present – Medieval Art History in the Contemporary City: Summer travel study course investigating the medieval art, architecture, and urban-national history of Paris including study of and visits to national monuments and treasures of Gothic architecture.

 

SELECTED COURSES TAUGHT, GRADUATE

  • AH C215D Gothic Art and Architecture: Art and architecture of Europe in 13th century. Concurrently scheduled with course C115D. S/U or letter grading.
  • AH C215F Medieval Paris: Material culture, art, architecture, and history of city of Paris to circa 1500
  • AH C217A Medieval Archaeology: Archaeology of medieval world.
  • AH 217C Medieval Art: Graduate seminar studying selected topics in Byzantine and European medieval art.
  • AH 217C Selected Topics: Materiality, Chartres Cathedral, Saint-Denis

Selected Links