Megan Boomer received her PhD in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. Her research focuses on the architecture of the medieval Mediterranean and explores how communities used building, decoration, and ritual to construct new understandings of sacred history. Her current book project, "Resurrecting the Resurrection," investigates how twelfth-century patrons staged the biblical past in the aftermath of the First Crusade. The work revisits traditional definitions of Crusader art and the architectural chronologies of key monuments, and examines how sites, structures, and stories were presented to and received by medieval Christian, Muslim, and Jewish pilgrims. Beyond the book, her other research projects include studies of Fatimid shrines in eleventh- and twelfth-century Egypt and Palestine and architecture and objects associated with the Cult of the Patriarchs in medieval Christianity and Islam. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture, and University of Pennsylvania. Prior to being at Columbia University, she was a Kress predoctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and taught courses on Byzantine, Medieval, and Islamic art at the University of Pennsylvania.

Megan joined us as a Mellon Fellow in Art Humanities.