Luke Fidler

Luke A. Fidler is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California. He specializes in the art and political economy of early- and high-medieval Europe, with an emphasis on the German-speaking lands, Scandinavia, and the British Isles. Among his interests, active areas of research include: sculpture (in both theory and practice), the long history of the landscape (as a subject of artistic concern and a site for the formation of political struggle), and formalism (its methods, historiographies, idiosyncracies, and critical resources). Fundamentally, his work asks: how did creative practices shape people’s lives and material conditions in the premodern world? 

His first book project, Coercive Form, examines how a range of sculpted objects, poems, and philosophical debates tackled problems of subjugation in the northern reaches of the Holy Roman Empire during the twelfth century. The book argues that sculptors forged a distinctive spatial grammar that yielded, in turn, a conceptual approach to form grounded in sculpture’s capacity to dominate its surrounding spaces and unwary spectators. During the 2026-27 academic year, he will be working on a second book as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study: Passages in Pictish Sculpture examines the enigmatic art of early-medieval Scotland. Ongoing projects include a study of the practices of figuration circulating in the Arctic art world (ca. 800-1300 CE), an investigation of figural weights used in the bullion economies of early-medieval Europe, and an abolitionist account of art history’s disciplinary dependence on carceral practices and paradigms of interpretation. 

Recent articles have explored how fine-grained studies of medieval art in its historical context—so different than our own—can productively defamiliarize accounts of how our social world has come to be. By looking at cases as diverse as the high-medieval cultivation of colonial vision in a luxury psalter, contemporary artists who explore the medieval roots of the modern prison, and the spatial rhetoric of the medieval boundary marker, we can pose a richer set of questions about modernity’s present and potential histories. These scholarly publications have lately appeared in, or are soon forthcoming from, The Art Bulletin, Critical Inquiry, Gesta, Radical History Review, Res, and Representations. Fidler has also contributed criticism to a variety of venues, including The Atlantic, The Brooklyn Rail, The Georgia Review, and Texte zur Kunst. 

Fidler’s research has been supported by a range of funding bodies, including the Paul Mellon Centre and the Henry Moore Foundation, and he has held fellowships from Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Motivated by a long-standing commitment to emancipatory pedagogy, he has taught art history with the Odyssey Project in Chicago and as a member of the Prison+Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. Before joining the Department of Art History in 2023, Fidler worked as a curator of contemporary art at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he also managed the Visualizing Abolition public scholarship initiative.

At USC, he teaches classes that examine all aspects of the medieval art world. Recent seminars include “Labor, Luxury, Abstraction,” “Early-Medieval Figurines,” and “The Work of Sculpture, 1150-1500.” Recent directed reading courses have explored the medieval codices held by USC’s Special Collections, Middle English literature, and medievalist video games; recent honors theses supervised have studied medieval leprosy and postcolonial repatriation debates. He welcomes inquiries from undergraduate and graduate students interested in the historical and theoretical complexity of medieval art.

• Ph.D. Art History, University of Chicago, 2022