Justin Willson Joins History of Art Faculty

Source: https://arthistory.yale.edu/news/justin-willson-joins-history-art-faculty Parent: https://arthistory.yale.edu/news/2025-08

Justin Willson Joins History of Art Faculty

August 21, 2025

Scholar in Byzantine Art Studies Deeper Meanings of Icons

Justin Willson, a leading scholar of Byzantine and early Slavic art, is joining the faculty of the History of Art Department at Yale University.

Willson will teach Byzantine and Slavic art, the theory of images, and the global exchanges between East and West in the medieval period. He will also participate in collaborations with colleagues affiliated with the Medieval Studies program and the Department of Classics.

Prior to arriving at Yale, Willson was curator at the Icon Museum and Study Center (formerly known as the Museum of Russian Icons) in Clinton, Massachusetts, which has an extensive collection of Russian, Greek, and Ethiopian works. There he oversaw exhibitions that explored historical and theological aspects of icons, their long arc of meaning, and how they relate to contemporary audiences.

Willson was raised in Albany, Georgia in a family descended from generations of pecan farmers — and that encouraged his artistic exploration and pursuits. By the time he was in high school, Willson was already engaged in the arts, but it was his interest in classical philosophy that introduced him to the medieval period and its art and iconography.

Following graduation at the University of Georgia in 2008 with degrees in English and philosophy, Willson taught high school literature for five years and was engaged in a neighborhood rehabilitation non-profit organization in South Georgia.

Whenever he could, Willson would return to Europe and spend weeks in places like Sienna, Florence, and Ravenna — all in Italy — where he would gaze in awe upon medieval artworks, Byzantine mosaics, and historic churches.

“I was fascinated by it all,” he said. “I knew I wanted to learn more, and at that time I was just reading and learning on my own. That’s when I knew I wanted to go to grad school.”

Willson liked philosophy as well as medieval art, but didn’t know if he wanted to write a dissertation about one or the other. A visiting program at Yale and another in Chicago clarified his decision. In 2015, Willson returned to academia at Princeton University to study art with a focus on Byzantine art, while his advisors encouraged him to continue exploring his interest in philosophy and literature, too.

While at Princeton, Willson also studied on a Fulbright scholarship in Moscow and did fieldwork in Russia, Turkey, Armenia, Ukraine, Greece, North Macedonia, Georgia, and Western Europe.

Willson earned his PhD in Art and Archaeology from Princeton in 2021. His dissertation looked toward Eurasia and early Muscovite art and culture with a focus on icons, frescos, and illuminated manuscripts.

He followed the completion of his PhD with postgraduate work at the Cleveland Museum of Art and Case Western Reserve University, where he received a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in art history leadership and co-directed a joint art-history program catering to MA and PhD students.

Alongside his curatorial and teaching work, Willson continued to publish essays in leading scholarly journals. In 2023, he co-authored with Ashley Morse an essay titled “Transferring Jerusalem to Moscow: Maksim Grek’s Letter and its Afterlife” for The Russian Review. That work focused on a new primary source explaining why copies of Jerusalem’s monuments were rare in the East Slavic world.

In 2026, Willson’s monograph, “The Moods of Early Art,” will be published by the University of Chicago Press. Based on almost a decade of research and travel, the book interweaves insights from art history, literary studies, and theology.

“‘Intellectual history’ was a big thing in mid-20th century,” Willson said, referring to the study of how ideas shape broader cultural phenomena: the arts, but also politics and the economy.

“It comes out of a German historical tradition, sort of tracing ideas across time and how they evolve. I think it’s been perhaps under-utilized in medieval art history, because art is a material example of theory, or a materialization of an idea.

“Take an icon: It may be a portrait, but it’s also expressing ideas through color, or gold, or configuration, or style — and it’s saying something different than maybe an image which may be more naturalistic. Intellectual history looks at how ideas are shaping the style or the iconography, and that requires looking at texts.”

Willson said making connections with the past through the ages makes him feel a bit like an art history detective. It’s a pursuit he looks forward to continuing at Yale.

“I love teaching,” he said. “I love working with students, and one thing I’m really looking forward to at the History of Art department is taking advantage of all the collections that are here in the U.S.”

— FRANK RIZZO