Ravi Binning (Ph.D, Stanford, 2019) specializes in the art and architecture of the late antique and medieval Mediterranean world. His work is always inspired by the question of how ancient and medieval aesthetics relate to the global present. His teaching and research therefore, addresses the art historical memory and canon-making; the relationship between art and psychosomatic experience; visual and architectural constructions of power, the carceral, and the apocalyptic. His research has been supported by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft) as well as the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), National Gallery of Art, Washington. His first book engages fear as an aesthetic construction in medieval art. He is also at work on two other projects, one devoted to the salvaged art of Byzantine Nubia and another to the afterlife of the Egyptian Christian mystical treatise, The Heavenly Ladder of John Climacus. Some of his research will soon appear in Dumbarton Oaks Papers and Speculum.

At OSU, he has taught several undergraduate courses, including Western Art I; Theory and Methods of Art History; Early Christian and Byzantine art. Binning has led a graduate seminar on the topic of pain and catharsis in ancient and medieval aesthetic traditions. In Spring 2023, he will lead a special topics course in architectural history devoted “Space, Ritual, and the Body.”