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John Lansdowne specializes in medieval and early modern art in Europe and the Mediterranean basin, with a particular focus on exchanges in the later Middle Ages between Western Christendom and the wider East Christian and Islamic worlds. Major elements of his research investigate the new meanings that objects and images accrue when brought into different cultural or ideological contexts and premodern paradigms for issues in contemporary culture and society.

At BC, he teaches across a wide chronological and geographical range, traversing the Middle Ages in Europe, the Mediterranean, Northeast Africa, and the Middle East. Many of his courses bridge the broader ancient, medieval, and early modern epochs, and he welcomes students in all disciplinary specializations.

Lansdowne鈥檚 writing has appeared in numerous venues, outlined below. His article 鈥淐ompounding Greekness鈥� (Gesta 2021) was awarded the 2023 Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. His current book project, Fraction = Union, examines visual allegories for ecumenical union鈥攖he fraught geopolitical and interreligious enterprise to unite all peoples and nations into an undivided 鈥渨orldwide鈥� Church. In addition, he co-leads a major project on portable mosaic artifacts, a collaboration among art historians, conservators, image scientists, and materials scientists initiated at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in 2023.

Beyond BC, Lansdowne鈥檚 work draws from extensive field, archival, and object-based research overseas, most especially in Italy, Turkey, and Greece. As a predoctoral candidate, he lived in Rome for three years, first at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max-Planck-Institut f眉r Kunstgeschichte), and next at the American Academy in Rome, where he held the Rome Prize in Medieval Studies for 2015鈥�2017. After receiving his Ph.D., he held the 2019鈥�2020 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Byzantine Studies at Bo臒azi莽i University in Istanbul, followed by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Postdoctoral Fellowship via the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. From 2021 to 2024, he was based at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, initially as a Berenson Fellow鈥攄esigned to support scholarship on 鈥淚taly in the World鈥濃�攁nd then as Assistant to the Director, a post he held for five terms. Other institutions to support his work include the Seeger 鈥�52 Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, the Delmas Foundation, BC鈥檚 Institute for the Liberal Arts, and Dumbarton Oaks.

Professor Lansdowne is a BC alumnus, having studied History and Classics with Professor Gail Hoffman. He received an M.Phil. in Classical Archaeology from St Cross College, Oxford and his Ph.D. from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University.