Overview
Luke Fidler is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California. He previously worked at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2022. Fidler studies northern European medieval art and visual culture, with a special focus on the German-speaking lands, Scandinavia, and the British Isles. At USC, he teaches courses on medieval art, sculptural theory, the politics of landscape, and the long histories of labor, luxury, and abstraction. He has published on a range of medieval topics, including Pictish carving, Carolingian form, and Inuit visuality, and regularly writes criticism. Fidler has been Paul Mellon Fellow (2019-22) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; his scholarship has also been supported by a wide range of organizations including, most recently, the Paul Mellon Centre and the Henry Moore Foundation.
Research Focus
Coercive Form
Fidler’s first book project examines ambitious high-medieval experiments in sculpture that accompanied novel modes of political subjugation along the northern edges of the Holy Roman Empire. Tracing a constellation of figural and spatial strategies from coins to life-size metallic figures to immersive carved environments, drawing on contemporary works of poetry and philosophy, the book argues that significant form was invested with coercive properties during the second half of the twelfth century. The stakes were large; sculpture’s power to reshape places, subjects, and concepts was newly enlisted in the service of world-shaping practices of colonization, forced conversion, and economic financialization. As such, the book aims to account for a host of strange objects that art history has struggled to metabolize while retheorizing the political dimensions of sculptural form in the Middle Ages.