Roland Betancourt

Roland Betancourt is a scholar of Byzantium and modern popular culture with research that lies firmly at the intersection of histories of science and technology, intellectual history, and the history of art. His research has explored theories of sensation and perception, the transmission of ancient knowledge, technical illustrations and diagrams, musicological analyses of texts and their recitation, and the premodern histories of queerness, gender variance, and racialization. He is the author of Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy (2021), Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (2020), and Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (2018), as well as several edited volumes and articles. Currently, Betancourt is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine. Betancourt is working on several ongoing book projects, including A Plurality of Means: Disneyland and the Aesthetics of Automation, on how the modern theme park popularized the rise of industrial automation and its logics in the post-war period, and Queer, Byzantine: Camp, Excess, Aesthetics on queer dialogues between the Byzantine past and modern art, architecture, literature, and popular culture.