BIOGRAPHY

Karl Whittington is a writer and art historian who lives and teaches in Columbus, Ohio. He studies medieval European art, focusing on questions of materiality, gender and sexuality, and the body. His books have explored the embodied experiences of anonymous medieval artisans (Queer Making: On Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe, 2025), the visual strategies of medieval Italian painters (Trecento Pictoriality, 2023), and the unusual drawings and maps of a medieval monk in Avignon named Opicinus de Canistris (Body-Worlds, 2014). He studied art history at Middlebury College and the University of California at Berkeley and is currently a faculty member at The Ohio State University.

PROJECT : Queer Materials: The Stuff of Art in Medieval Europe

Queer Materials explores the meanings that particular materials held for premodern artists. Materials like wood, stone, pearls, ivory, gold, gems, and coral were wonders of nature, each with complicated histories, associations, and physical properties. Beliefs about how these materials came into being in the earth were often expressed through metaphors and mythologies of birth, gender, and sexuality. In turn, materials were also believed to impact the bodies of the people who interacted with them. These issues are explored through specific object histories, primary texts, and speculative writing.