May Peterson

Biography

May Peterson works on the art and architecture of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (ca 5th-8th centuries), especially in the Merovingian kingdoms. She is interested in the borders of Christianity and its sacred spaces, the disciplinary boundary between art history and archaeology, and in the historiographies of conversion and ethnogenesis as they play into European national identities. May also works at the Special Collections Resource Center at Regenstein Library, which fuels her interest in theories of the archive, how we perceive it, and what it excludes. May earned a BA in Classics from Stanford University and wrote her honors thesis on the poetry of Venantius Fortunatus and what it tells us about sixth-century landscapes of the sacred.