Mariah Proctor-Tiffany
Mariah Proctor-Tiffany teaches courses in medieval and Islamic art and architecture, and in the cross-cultural exchange of medieval objects. She also writes about 20th-century women collecting medieval and Islamic art. And she specializes in Digital Art History, working with Tracy Chapman Hamilton on the digital project mappingthemedievalwoman.com, which highlights women’s impact on the medieval cityscape of Paris.
She has received numerous research fellowships, including a Samuel H. Kress Travel Fellowship, an International Center of Medieval Art book research award, and an Andrew W. Mellon Art History Publication Initiative grant. Before coming to Long Beach, she taught at Rhode Island School of Design and worked in New York City at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and at The Cloisters, the branch of the museum devoted to art and architecture of the Middle Ages.
In her scholarship, Dr. Proctor-Tiffany explores art and the performance of identity by medieval women, arguing that as they were often separated from their loved ones by politically strategic marriages, they maintained their relationships through international gifts of sculptures, reliquaries, textiles, jewels, and manuscripts. The luxurious objects they circulated testified to the women’s identities, strengthening their claims to income and political power.
She served as the first faculty coordinator of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program at CSULB, and she was the recipient of the Early Academic Career Excellence Award at the university. She enjoys collaborating with colleagues around the world and teaching at Long Beach because of the curiosity and varied perspectives of her students.
- PhD, Brown University
- Medieval Art in Motion: The Inventory and Gift Giving of Queen Clémence de Hongrie. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. Awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Art History Publication Initiative Grant.
- Moving Women Moving Objects (400-1500). Co-edited with Tracy Chapman Hamilton. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
With Tracy Chapman Hamilton, Mapping the Medieval Woman, digital resource and publications highlighting women’s impact on the medieval cityscape of Paris.
- With Tracy Chapman Hamilton, “Inscribing Her Presence: Digital Mapping and Women in Late Medieval Paris” in Medieval People: Social Bonds, Kinship, and Networks (2022) Vol. 37: Iss. 1, Article 3. Available at https:// scholarworks.wmich.edu/medpros/vol37/iss1/3
- “Doris Duke and Mary Crane: Collecting Islamic art for Shangri La, a Hawaiian Hideaway Home” Journal of the History of Collections, (January 2022): 1-13.
- With Tracy Chapman Hamilton, “Women and the Circulation of Material Culture: Crossing Boundaries and Connecting Spaces” in Moving Women Moving Objects (400-1500) (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 1-12.
- “Transported as a Rare Object of Distinction: Gift Giving in the Inventory and Testament of Clémence of Hungary” The Journal of Medieval History 41 no. 2 (2015): 208-28.
- “Lost and Found: Visualizing a Medieval Queen’s Destroyed Objects” in Queens in the Mediterranean, ed. Elena Woodacre, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 73-96. Named article of the month by Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index.
- Mariah Proctor-Tiffany, et al., Historic Wallpapers 1750-1949. Brown University class-curated museum exhibit. The Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Exhibition Notes 21, Spring 2003. The result of the Graduate Practicum Class, Winter 2002.
- Mariah Proctor-Tiffany, et al., The Object of Ornament: European Design, 1480-1800. Brown University class-curated museum exhibit. The Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Exhibition Notes 18, Spring 2002.
