About

Megan Boomer is an architectural historian of the medieval Mediterranean. Boomer’s research explores how the design, decoration, and use of sacred space defined historical memories and communities. Boomer teaches courses on medieval visual cultures, architectural history, pilgrimage, and urban space.

Boomer’s current book project, Reconstructing the Holy Land, uses extant architecture, lost iconography (including images and inscriptions), archaeological reports, and textual sources to investigate the reshaping of sacred sites in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099-1187). In addition to research on “Crusader” art, Boomer also studies Fatimid shrines in eleventh- and twelfth-century Egypt and Palestine, the visual culture of Arabic-speaking Christian communities, and twentieth-century representations of the crusades.

Before coming to Bates, Boomer held postdoctoral fellowships at the Getty Research Institute and Columbia University and received a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019.