Carly B. Boxer is a historian of medieval art whose work centers on the connections between medieval image-making practices and period ideas about vision, knowledge, and the capacity of images to structure and guide thought. Boxer’s current book project analyses manuscripts related to medicine, health, and healing made in late medieval England to propose that images in these books functioned as pedagogical tools, not only to teach their readers how to perform surgical procedures or produce medicines, but also train readers in how the human body ought to look, and how it should be looked at. This work foregrounds medieval diagrams, charts, amuletic images, and other visual tools and technologies used to produce and communicate knowledge in the medieval world.

Boxer earned a PhD in Art History at the University of Chicago before coming to Rice. In 2018 – 2019, Boxer held the Council on Library and Information Resources Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources as well as a Junior Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. With the aid of the Medieval Academy of America’s New Horizons Research Grant, Boxer is currently at work on an additional project that analyzes medievalism in the architecture of the American prison reform movement of the 1930s to investigate the challenging legacy of the Middle Ages in modernity.