Erin Piñon

Bio/Description

Profile

Erin Piñon is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in early modern Armenian book arts and material culture. Her work is informed by her studies in medieval and early modern literature, liturgy, and theology. Erin’s dissertation examines the relationship between memory, history, and diaspora in Ottoman-Armenian painting and printing in 17th-century Istanbul, with a special focus on Armenian illustration in para liturgical genres.

Erin graduated with a B.A. from Tufts University with a major in Art History before completing her M.A. in Art History at Southern Methodist University. She has done significant work on projects as a fellow at the Dallas Museum of Art, an intern at the Armenian Museum of America, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is currently a coeditor of the Reviews and Reconsiderations section of the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies (JSAS) and a regular host of the Podcast of the Society for Armenian Studies (SAS).

Erin’s research has been generously supported by a Samuel H. Kress Research Fellowship in Renaissance Art History, the Renaissance Society of America, the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

In 2016-2017, Erin was a U.S. Student Fulbright Researcher in Yerevan, Armenia, where she was a researcher at the Mesrop Mashtots‛ Institute of Ancient Manuscripts (Matenadaran) and designed and taught the course “From Monasteries to Manuscripts: Visual and Material Culture in Medieval Armenia” at the American University of Armenia. In 2022–2023, she was a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellow in Yerevan and Istanbul.

Selected Publications

“Printing Pilgrimage: Replication and Imagination between Tokat and Jerusalem,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 29, no. 01 (Fall 2022): 74–95.

“Imaging and Imagining Armenian History: Manuscript Illustration in Early Modern Vaspurakan,” in Art and Religion in Medieval Armenia, ed. Helen C. Evans (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Distributed by Yale University Press, 2022), 61–75.

“Lock, Stock and Barrel: Story, Song, and Image in Early Modern Vaspurakan,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 7, no. 2 (Winter 2021): 95–114.

Exhibition Catalogue Contributions:

Armenia: Art, Religion and Trade in the Middle Ages, edited by Helen C. Evans (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven, Connecticut: Distributed by Yale University Press, 2018)

Ida O’Keeffe: Escaping Georgia’s Shadow, edited by Sue Canterbury (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2018)

Other

Manuscript Heritage of Arts’akh and Utilk’, edited by Karen Matevosyan, Erin Piñon (Yerevan: Mesrop Mashtots’ Matenadaran and the Armenian General Benevolent Union, 2022)

Դադիվանք. վերածնված հրաշալիք [Dadivank, The Revived Miracle], edited Karen Matevosyan, Erin Piñon (Yerevan: Victoria International Charitable Foundation, 2018).

Field(s)
Medieval Art