Research Interests
- Art, architecture, and archaeology of the Mediterranean
- Ritual architecture and decoration
- Transcultural interaction and the processes of localization
- Memory theory(ies)
- Cultural heritage preservation
- Digital Humanities
Education
BA, Art History, Arizona State University
MA, Art History, Montana State University
Bio
Kearstin A. Jacobson is a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research addresses the interrelationship of cultic activity around the ancient and late antique Mediterranean through material culture, emphasizing continuity, localization, and the role of memory to navigate artificial disjunctions common to much earlier scholarship, particularly those situating the Roman and eastern Roman (Byzantine) empires as separate entities. Within this context, her doctoral research focuses on the architectural framing of ritual processions across the longue durée Roman Empire. By examining the evolution from monuments marking processional routes in urban space to early church architecture, she challenges the academic tendency privileging experiential knowledge exclusive to elite audiences when situating churches as successors of palace architecture. Jacobson’s doctoral work has benefitted from the support of the Graduate School, College of Fine Arts, and Medieval Studies interdisciplinary cluster at UT, as well as a John R. Coleman Traveling Fellowship from the Archaeological Institute of America and a Lemmermann Foundation research award.
Before commencing doctoral studies, Jacobson obtained her BA in art history from Arizona State University, and her MA in art history from Montana State University with a thesis investigating the development and diffusion of Christological iconography in Late Antiquity. Participation in “The Art Historical Image in the Digital Age,” summer program at the American Academy in Rome was also a crucial formative experience, leading to the integration of digital technologies in her scholarship. Additionally, Jacobson is co-creator of “Blast from the Casts,” an interactive online exhibition funded, in part, by Humanities Texas and exploring contemporary issues surrounding collecting, authenticity, and ethnocentric whiteness through three-dimensional photogrammetric models of plaster casts after ancient Greek and Roman sculpture: battlecasts.la.utexas.edu.