Prof. Christina Maranci joined the Davis Center's Executive Committee in the 2023-2024 academic year and was awarded a Harvard College Professorship for excellence in undergraduate teaching (2025-2030).
Her work explores the art and culture of Armenia in all aspects, with special emphasis on the late antique and medieval periods. She is the author of four books and over 100 articles and essays on medieval Armenian art and architecture, including Art of Armenia (Oxford UP, 2018). Her 2015 monograph, Vigilant Powers: Three Churches of Early Medieval Armenia (Brepols), won the Karen Gould Prize for Art History from the Medieval Academy of America as well as the Sona Aronian Prize for best Armenian studies monograph from the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR). She is co-founder of "East of Byzantium," a workshop and lecture series designed to support graduate students working on the Christian East.
Maranci has also worked on issues of cultural heritage for over a decade, with a focus on at-risk Armenian churches and monasteries in what is now Eastern Turkey. She is the author of op-eds and essays in The Wall Street Journal, Apollo, The Conversation, and Hyperallergic and has been featured on National Public Radio. She has been working on a book about the city of Ani during the 10th and 11th centuries, exploring issues of art and architecture, epigraphy, landscape, theology, politics, and social roles.
Maranci grew up in a diasporan Armenian family in Westport, Connecticut. She earned a B.A. in art history at Vassar and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton's Department of Art and Archaeology.
