Tjisje Geertje

Jasperse

Research

Currently I am a Ramón y Cajal researcher (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, RYC2021-033251-I). My research focuses on the medieval visual and material culture of authority and gender, foregrounding that women were essential players in the formation and consolidation of transregional ties and liturgical practices.

In my current project “The Art of Concealment: The Display, Storage, Burial and Loss of Seals (ca. 1200-1400)”  I explore the material culture connected with medieval seals - charters, seal-bags, chronicles, cartularies, and grave goods - in order to understand how and why seals were not only displayed, but also stored and buried. Using insights from anthropology and archaeology, the acts of display and concealment are connected with seals’ movement and stasis. This allows us to understand medieval practices of storing, curating, and concealing, together with modern ideas concerning retrieving and reconstructing the past.

Curriculum Vitae

My art historical path started in Amsterdam, where I studied at the Vrije Universiteit (BA) and University of Amsterdam (MA), where I also wrote my dissertation about Duchess Matilda of Saxony (defended 2013). I was a lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Amsterdam (2007-2015). In 2015 I received the prestigious Juan de la Cierva-Formación, a two-year postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity. This brought me to Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid (2016-2018), where I participated in Therese Martin’s project The Medieval Treasury across Frontiers and Generations: The Kingdom of León-Castilla in the Context of Muslim-Christian Interchange, c. 1050-1200. From 2018-2022 I was Assistant Professor at the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte (Professur für Bildkulturen des Mittelalters led by Kathrin Müller) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. There I was also involved in The Medieval Iberian Treasury in Context: Collections, Connections, and Representations on the Peninsula and Beyond (PI Therese Martin, 2019-2022), which addresses broad socio-cultural questions concerning the role of sumptuary collections as evidence of contacts both within and beyond Iberia during the central Middle Ages.

I was a founding member of the Center for Medieval Studies Amsterdam (2011-2015). In 2019 I was elected International Associate to the Board of Directors, International Center of Medieval Art (New York). From 2018-2022 I served on the Leeds Program Committee of the Medieval Academy of America. Since 2020 I have been the series editor for CARMEN Visual and Material Cultures (Arc Humanities Press), and since 2023 I am an editorial board member of Archivo Español de Arte.