Jennifer Borland

Dr. Borland is an art historian specializing in the art and architecture of medieval Europe. Dr. Borland is also the Fae Rawdon Norris Professor of the Humanities and founding Director of the OSU Center for the Humanities, and previously led the Digital Humanities Initiative on campus. She has served in a variety of other positions while at OSU, including as Interim Department Head, Associate Department Head, Director of Graduate Studies in Art History, and the College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Fellow for Community Engagement. She is a 2019 graduate of the HERS Institute, a higher education leadership development program. Along with Dr. Nancy Thompson (St. Olaf College), she is managing co-editor of the open access online journal Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art. She was a founding member of the Material Collective (2013-2024), a collaborative group that sought to expand the form of and avenues for academic work, in part through prioritizing creativity, adventurousness, and activism in art historical research and writing. 

She is the author of Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the Régime du corps (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022; paperback ed. 2024), recipient of the Best First Book of Feminist Scholarship on the Middle Ages (2024), Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship and the 2025 Karen Gould Prize in Art History from the Medieval Academy of America.

Research Interests:
medieval medical and scientific imagery, medievalism and collecting, materiality, the corporeal experience of objects and spaces, audience and reception, representations of gender, digital humanities, engaged art history