Denva Gallant presents a collaborative performance with Christopher Stark (Cornell DMA on Composition, 2013) of Stark’s “The Life of Macarius” for speaker, vocoder, and strings.

Dr. Gallant is an internationally-recognized scholar and specialist in European medieval art and architecture, with an emphasis on manuscript illumination and the figural arts of the Trecento. Her scholarly work explores issues of narrative, the rise of the eremitic ideal as exemplum virtutis, environmental imaginaries (such as the desert), race and ethnicity in late medieval Italy and issues of patronage in the Middle Ages. She has received a number of research fellowships including, awards from Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. She is currently the recipient of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Rome Prize in Medieval Studies for the 2022-2023 academic year. She has published in Gesta and has forthcoming publications in I Tatti Studies and Ethnicity and Race in Medieval Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Her book project, Illuminating the Vitae patrum: The Lives of the Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Penn State University Press, 2024), is the first work to examine comprehensively the Morgan Library’s richly illustrated manuscript of the VP (MS. M. 626), whose extraordinary illustrations comprise a singular witness to the rise of the eremitic ideal and its impact on the visual culture of late medieval Italy. Dr. Gallant has also brought her scholarship on the Desert Fathers to a wider, public audience, performing text from the The Lives of the Desert Fathers with the Mivos Quartet, in collaboration with composer, Dr. Christopher Stark.