Profile

Justin Willson is currently the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History Leadership at the Cleveland Museum of Art and Case Western Reserve University. Justin specializes in medieval art with a focus on Byzantium and Russia. His research emphasizes the history of interpretation and premodern theories of aesthetic value.  

At present Justin is working on two books. The first, a monograph entitled The Moods of Early Russian Art, 14th–16th Centuries, blends archival work with theory to offer a modernizing look at the way art was interpreted, historicized and valued in Muscovy. The second, volume 4 in the series “Sources for Byzantine Art History” and tentatively entitled The Visual Culture of Late Byzantium and the Early Modern Orthodox World, c.1330–c.1669 (in preparation for Cambridge University Press), is a handbook of primary sources in translation. Situating Constantinople, Moscow, and other cultural hubs in overlapping worlds, the volume will reveal shared assumptions about how art signified across the languages of the East Mediterranean and beyond. 

Smaller projects have explored Neoplatonic texts of art theory, Jerusalem mimesis in early modern Muscovy, the Triumph of Orthodoxy icon at the British Museum and the relation of magic to artworks. His essay “Virtue Idealized in the Palace Murals of Ivan the Terrible” won first prize at the 2020 North East Slavic, East European and Eurasian Conference, and his study of trinitarian diagrams refuting the Filioque, “On the Aesthetic of Diagrams in Byzantine Art,” won second prize in the 2019 graduate essay competition through the International Center of Medieval Art.  

While focused on medieval art, Justin maintains a wider interest in the longevity of the humanities.  In his work at the Cleveland Art Museum, he is developing projects through the department of Public and Academic Engagement that build bridges between artists, academics and various Cleveland communities. As a pianist, he enjoys composing and performing folk music, while probably his greatest side interest remains reading and writing poetry and translating Russian verse. 

Justin returned to academia in 2013 after five years of teaching high school literature and running a neighborhood rehabilitation nonprofit in Southwest Georgia. He studied philosophy and literature as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia and worked broadly in visiting programs at Yale and the University of Chicago before coming to Princeton in 2015. At Princeton, Justin wrote his dissertation under Professors Charles Barber, Beatrice Kitzinger, and Paul Bushkovitch (Yale). 

Justin’s research has been supported by the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, the Center for the Study of Religion, the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture, and Hillwood Estates, Museum & Gardens. He is the recipient of The Frank J. Mather Jr. Memorial Graduate Award (2019) and a Fulbright Grant (2018-19) to Moscow State University where he worked with Professors E. S. Smirnova and A. S. Preobrazhensky.