Claire Dillon is the 2025 Paul Mellon Rome Prize Fellow in medieval studies and a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she specializes in the intersections of visual cultures, identities, and faiths in the medieval Mediterranean and their modern afterlives. Her dissertation focuses on silk textile production in Sicily, analyzing numerous fragments attributed—or misattributed—to Muslim weavers on the island. By shedding new light on these oft-overlooked materials, Dillon explores how modern perceptions of medieval Mediterranean diversity have evolved, especially with reference to histories of Islamic culture in Europe. She is the inaugural fellow of the International Interfaith Research Lab at Teachers College and earned an MPhil in medieval language, literature, and culture from Trinity College Dublin as a Mitchell Scholar, and a BA in art history and Italian from Northwestern University, where she studied contemporary art as a Mellon Mays Fellow.
What have you been working on while at AAR?
I’m primarily working on my dissertation, “Narratives of Entanglement: The Making of Medieval Sicily through Fragmented Silks and Societies,” which examines silk production in Sicily during its Islamic and Christian periods in the Middle Ages. My research ranges from studying the small technical details of surviving silks to considering the larger implications of Sicily’s Islamic past within scholarship of its silk textiles, of the medieval Mediterranean, and of the modern Italian nation more broadly.
At the same time, I’m gathering research about twentieth-century neomedieval architecture in Italy and its colonies, in order to examine how the nation’s Islamic and medieval pasts were exploited for imperial aims. I’ve visited the archives of various missionary orders and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome, and my preliminary work on this topic reveals the history of the Cathedral of Mogadishu for the first time and explores its manipulation of Norman Sicilian architecture. My two articles on this topic are forthcoming in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and Speculum.
How have your interactions with the AAR community influenced your work?
As someone who specializes in centuries-old material, I do not often engage with living designers, makers, or artists. At the Academy, I’m working in a completely different environment: whether looking at fibers with Amy Revier or chatting about kermes and cochineal pigments with Katherine Beaty, I am always encountering materials and histories in new ways. Having discussed Boethius with Rick Lowe and tracked down research about Black gondoliers with Sheila Bridges, I deeply appreciate these opportunities to see our projects from fresh perspective and to better understand how my research resonates today.
I feel fortunate to be immersed in a community united by our interests in Italy. From fellows’ shop talks to conversations over meals, I am constantly exposed to unexpected ideas and connections between my work and others’ projects. This has been a great opportunity to expand my relationships in Rome and around the country, especially as I develop research in other fields.
Has your work changed since arriving?
I’ve found more opportunities to return to my past work in contemporary art, which has been a welcome surprise. I just finished writing an essay about the work of Khaled Sabsabi for an upcoming exhibition, drawing from my expertise in the art history of the lands of Islam. I also conducted an interview with one of the curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return for Devon Dikeou’s zingmagazine. I’m really grateful to Devon for encouraging me to return to Gonzalez-Torres’s work, and I am eager to discover what the rest of the fellowship has in store.
What is coming up in the next few months, and after your return home from Rome?
This spring, I will give my shoptalk with Amy and will participate in the Circolo Gianicolense seminar series, the conference “Using the Past for the Present: Medieval Narratives in Modern Political and Religious Discourse” at John Cabot, and a workshop at I Tatti about the Black Mediterranean.
While some of my upcoming plans have yet to be announced, I look forward to continuing my fellowship with the Interfaith Research Lab at Teachers College, Columbia University. As the lab’s inaugural fellow, I research extremist manipulations of the medieval past—which are widespread among radicalized networks—and devise ways for researchers and educators to combat this phenomenon. Building upon the scholarship of generations of medievalists, this work reclaims the diversity and dynamism of the Middle Ages, which are so often misrepresented outside our field, from mainstream political discourse to the darkest corners of the internet. My project equips educators with a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of this history.