Jessica Barker is a specialist in medieval art, with a particular emphasis on sculpture. She studied at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she was subsequently Henry Moore Postdoctoral Fellow. She joined The Courtauld in 2018, after two years as a lecturer in world art at the University of East Anglia.
Jessica’s research ranges across northern Europe and the Iberian peninsular, addressing questions of the macabre, gender, materiality and the body. Her prize-winning monograph, Stone Fidelity: Marriage and Emotion in Medieval Tomb Sculpture, based on work from her doctoral thesis, explores the intersection of love and death in funerary art. She is the co-editor of Revisiting the Monument. Fifty Years Since Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture, a collection of essays addressing Erwin Panofsky’s scholarship on tomb sculpture. She has published widely on death and commemoration, with articles in journals including: Art Bulletin, Art History, British Art Studies, The Burlington Magazine, Gesta, and The Sculpture Journal.
Forthcoming publications include two essays on the artistic patronage of Iberian noblewomen in England. Her current projects include co-curating an exhibition exploring measurement and regulation in medieval and contemporary art, entitled The Rule: Shaping Lives, Medieval and Modern, which will open at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art in 2026. She is also working on a research project investigating the lives and afterlives of the padrões, columns erected on the coast of West Africa by Portuguese navigators.
PhD Supervision
Current
Chloe Kellow (with Prof. Joanna Cannon): A Cumulative Work of Art: The Silver Altar of Saint James, Pistoia, (1287-1456) Expanded, Reconfigured, Restaged.
Florence Eccleston: The Iconography and Perception of Sin in Late Medieval English Wall Paintings.
Sophia Adams: ‘In worship of hym that thys mesur is of’: Measurement Relics, Representation, and Truth in Late Medieval English Manuscript Rolls.
Isabella Schwarzer: Shimmering Death: Golden Bodies and Representing the Dead in Medieval Europe c. 1100-1400.
Publications
Books
- Stone Fidelity. Marriage and Emotion in Medieval Tomb Sculpture.
(Boydell Press, 2020).
Winner of the 2021 prize for best single- or dual-authored book on any topic in medieval art from the International Centre of Medieval Art.
Winner of the 2022 prize for exemplary scholarship (pre-1600) from the Historians of British Art
- Revisiting the Monument. Fifty Years Since Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture.
eds. Jessica Barker and Ann Adams (London: Courtauld Books On-Line, 2016)
Articles
- “Maintenance Work and the Long Life of Materials in Medieval Art.” Art Bulletin 105, no. 3 (2023), pp. 8—32
- “‘Fully Armed in Plate of War’: Making the Effigy of the Black Prince.” with Emily Pegues and Graeme McArthur, The Burlington Magazine, November 2021, pp. 997-1009
- “Frustrated Seeing: Scale, Visibility and a Fifteenth-Century Royal Monument in Portugal.” Art History 41, no. 2 (2018), pp. 220–45.
- “The Sculpted Epitaph— Word and Image in Funerary Sculpture.” The Sculpture Journal 26, no. 2 (2017), pp. 235–64.
- “Legal Crisis and Artistic Innovation in Thirteenth-Century Scotland.” In Invention and Imagination in British Art and Architecture. Special Edition of British Art Studies 6 (2017).
- “Invention and Commemoration in Fourteenth-Century England: A Monumental ‘Family Tree’ at the Church of St Martin, Lowthorpe.” Gesta 56.1 (2017), pp. 105–28.
Book Chapters
- “A Book-Bound Voice: Liturgical Books and the Commemoration of the Dead.” In The Medieval Book as Object, Idea and Symbol, ed. Julian Luxford (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2021), pp. 200—223.
- “The Speaking Tomb: Ventriloquizing the Voices of the Dead.” In Picturing Death: 1200- 1600, eds. Stephen Perkinson and Noa Turel (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 129-63.
- “Stone and Bone: The Corpse, the Effigy and the Viewer in Late-Medieval Tomb Sculpture.” In Revisiting the Monument. Fifty Years Since Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture, eds. Jessica Barker and Ann Adams (London: Courtauld Books On-Line: 2016).
Catalogue Essays
- “Alabaster as a Material for Funerary Monuments.” In Alabaster Sculpture in Europe, 1300-1650, ed. Marjan Debaene (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022)
Other current/ongoing professional activities
- Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries
- Editorial board, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Sculpture book series (Brepols)
- International Advisor to EFFIGY project, ANR-funded (French national research agency)
