Dr. Denva Gallant is an internationally recognized scholar of medieval and early Renaissance art whose work spans manuscripts, painting, sculpture, and performance to explore how images shape cultural imagination, devotional practice, and the visual construction of race.
Her current book project, Projected Images: Blackness and the Visual Imagination in Late Medieval Italy, explores how artists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries represented Black Africans across painting, fresco, sculpture, and manuscript illumination. Focusing on five recurring figure types, the project shows how images of Blackness—crafted by European artists—both reinforced and questioned structures of power. Drawing on premodern critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, the book reframes race-making in the Middle Ages and expands understandings of Black presence in European visual history.
Dr. Gallant’s research has been supported by fellowships from Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA); and the American Academy in Rome. Her scholarship has appeared in Gesta, I Tatti Studies, Different Visions, with additional work forthcoming in Ethnicity and Race in Medieval Europe, Africa, and the Middle East and Different Visions. Her first book, Illuminating the Vitae Patrum: The Lives of the Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Penn State University Press, 2024), offers the first comprehensive study of the Morgan Library’s richly illustrated Vitae patrum manuscript and its role in shaping eremitic visual culture.
Alongside her academic work, Dr. Gallant is deeply committed to public-facing humanities. She produces the educational reel series Visible/Invisible: From Medieval Margins to Modern Stages (@dr_denva) and contributes public essays to outlets such as Public Books and Hyperallergic, bringing her research on race, vision, and representation into wider public conversations.
Books
Gallant, Denva. Illuminating the Vitae patrum: The Lives of the Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024.
Selected Articles and Essays
Gallant, Denva. “All About Love from a Black Angel,” Hyperallergic, 2026. https://hyperallergic.com/all-about-love-from-a-black-medieval-angel/
Gallant, Denva. “Extracting Blackness, From the Middle Ages to Today.” Public Books, 2025. https://www.publicbooks.org/extracting-blackness-from-the-middle-ages-to-today/
Gallant, Denva, “Approaches to Alterity: Race and Racialization in Late Medieval Italian Art History,” in Ethnicity and Race in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, ed. Lamia Balafrej and Hannah Barker. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, expected 2026.
Gallant, Denva, “Memoria and the Spiritual Journey in the Thebaid Cycle at Santa Marta in Siena,” Denva Gallant and Amelia Hope-Jones, eds. “Environmental Narrativesand the Eremitic Turn.” Special Issue, Different Visions, Spring 2025. https://differentvisions.org/memoria-and-the-spiritual-journey/
Gallant, Denva, “Into the Desert: Demons, Spiritual Focus, and the Eremitic Ideal in Pierpont Morgan Library MS. M.626,” Gesta 60, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 101–119.
Gallant, Denva, “The Monastic in the Dynastic: Images of Kingship in the Morgan Library’s Vitae patrum (NY, P. Morgan Library, Ms. M.626),” I Tatti Studies, (Spring 2024).
Gallant, Denva, “In the Land of the Thebaids: Landscape, Place, and Ambulatio,” Denva Gallant and Amelia Hope-Jones, eds. “Environmental Narratives and theEremitic Turn.” Special Issue, Different Visions, (Spring 2025), forthcoming
Note to prospective graduate students: I welcome queries from students interested in researching the art history of late medieval Europe and the greater Mediterranean.
Photo: Laurie Lambrecht