Prior to coming to Yale, Justin Willson was curator at the Icon Museum and Study Center in Clinton, Massachusetts. The museum holds the country’s largest collection of icons — images of a holy person or event created by an iconographer and venerated by the faithful as a connection to the divine.
Last spring, the museum featured an exhibition he organized: called “Printing Icons,” it explored how print and icon painting interacted from the 17th to the early 20th centuries.
Comprised of more than 60 works from seven institutions, the exhibition “looked at a lot of different techniques, like engraving, woodblock carving, lithography, and an indigenous method of printing icons that flourished in 17th- and 18th-century Poland, Lithuania, Russia, and Greece,” Willson, a historian of Byzantine and early Slavic art, said.
Over the summer, Willson joined the Department of the History of Art, in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, as an assistant professor. This fall, he is sharing his deep knowledge of ancient religious images with Yale undergrads in a course on icons.
A native of Georgia, Willson graduated from the University of Georgia with degrees in English and philosophy, then spent five years teaching high school literature before returning to academia to earn his Ph.D. in art and archaeology at Princeton University. He subsequently held the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Art History Leadership at the Cleveland Museum of Art and Case Western Reserve University.
In the latest edition of Office Hours, a Q&A series that introduces new Yale faculty members to the broader community, Willson talks about his fascination with the power of iconic imagery, the richness of Yale’s collections, and his new favorite place to go for a bike ride.
| Title | Assistant professor in the history of art |
|---|---|
| Research Interest | Byzantine and early Slavic art |
| Prior Institution | Icon Museum and Study Center |
| Started at Yale | July 1, 2025 |
What drew you to Byzantine art?
Justin Willson: I was interested in classical philosophy, and that introduced me to the medieval period and Byzantine art. Byzantine art developed in the 6th century after the Roman Empire became a Christian empire. At the same time that they were figuring out what that means, what Christianity means, they were also looking back to ancient Greece as a place where a lot of ideas were generated around art, politics, and literature. They were pulling things forward from antiquity that they thought were relevant as they worked through iconoclasm. What does it mean to have an image that represents a saintly figure, but also uses signs and symbols from the ancient Mediterranean to teach a new doctrine? There are a lot of fascinating questions around what it means to represent something, what it means to have something that stands for something else. And I was also interested in the fact that they produced lots of writing around these images. The Byzantine writers had lots to say.
What are you working on now?
Willson: I’m finishing a book on early Muscovite art from the 14th to the 16th century. This is a time when Moscow begins defining its identity politically, but also culturally and through the visual arts. They’re looking at neighboring East Slavic polities like Novgorod, which is in northwestern Russia and has lots of trade connections to northern Europe. And you have other cultures in Western Siberia that are dealing with fur trappers and salt mines and salt boiling. They’re also looking to Ukraine, and at Kievan culture, which is using mosaics and icon painting. Moscow is looking around at all these different versions of late medieval Byzantine culture, and they’re defining their own identity. It’s this big moment of flourishing. The book takes the story through two centuries and looks at how images change and the discourse and conversation around them evolve.
Do Yale’s resources align especially well with your scholarly interests?
Willson: My class was just in the Beinecke [Rare Book and Manuscript Library], which has some excellent collections of 17th-century printed books from Moscow, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania that I can teach with. Additionally, the Yale University Art Gallery has some early Veneto Cretan icons. And they have early Christian ampullae from the Mediterranean world.
What do you like to do outside of work?
Willson: We live in Hamden, and I love going for bike rides and jogging on the Farmington Canal trail. I spent two summers as an undergrad working at the Grand Canyon and Glacier National Park, and I love the outdoors and hiking. Every chance I get I’m taking trips to do that. I play piano as well. In a different lifetime I might have been a singer/songwriter. I love folk music and that kind of storytelling through music.
