Interview with Professor Roland Betancourt

Roland Betancourt is a Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine, and a leading scholar of Byzantine art, visual culture, and intellectual history. His work explores how Byzantine thinkers understood vision, imagination, and the sensory experience of sacred spaces, drawing on manuscripts, theological writings, and material culture. Betancourt is the author of Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium, a study that illuminates how Byzantine artists and writers conceptualized perception and representation, and how these ideas shaped artistic practice. His research is known for revealing the sophistication of Byzantine visual and intellectual traditions and for offering new perspectives on how the medieval Byzantine world interpreted images, art, and the material environment.

In our discussion, we discussed a lot of specifics about the Byzantines, as well as it's impact both during it's own time or it's influences later on, as well as surprising inventions and innovations that existed in the empire during this time.