Robyn Barrow is an art historian of medieval Europe in a connected world. She specializes in art, cultural exchange and environmental histories of Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. Her region of study encounters the sovereign homelands of the Inuit and Sámi, and she has traveled extensively in the Arctic. Her manuscript, Tracking North: Art, Ecology and Exchange in the Medieval Nordic World explores cultural systems extending across the vast spaces of the north. The project illuminates the ways that systems of secular and religious power were creatively negotiated by communities across the wide Norse-settled region in the Middle Ages, from Gotland to Greenland. Her second project, Thaw: Revelation and Erasure in the Medieval North, considers the relationship between medieval art and the temporalities of contemporary environmental crisis.
PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 2025
MA, University of Pennsylvania, 2019
MA, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2016
BA, Rhodes College, 2015
