Professor Whittington is a specialist in European medieval art and architecture, particularly issues relating to the history of science, cartography, gender and sexuality, and materiality. His first book, Body-Worlds: Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination, was published by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto in 2014. In 2021 he co-edited a volume of essays with Dr. Bryan Keene called New Horizons in Trecento Italian Art (Brepols). His second monograph, Trecento Pictoriality: Diagrammatic Painting in Late Medieval Italy, was published by Brepols in 2023. His next book project, Queer Making: Desire and the Creation of Medieval Art, explores the ways in which the material processes of different media put the bodies of medieval artists into situations that can be read through the lens of queer desire.

Prof. Whittington has published essays in journals such as Gesta, Studies in Iconography, Dante Studies, Kunstlicht, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Mediaevalia, Postmedieval, Different Visions, and Transgender Studies Quarterly. At Ohio State he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on medieval art, and his teaching has been recognized by the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching (2015) and the Ratner Award for Distinguished Teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences (2017). He has been awarded fellowships and grants from the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), the College Art Association (CAA), the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), and the Kress Foundation.