Creative Art History: Roland Betancourt, UC Irvine

“Like the Dawn of Creation: Byzantine Fragments in the Modern Imagination”

125 Chapman Hall

This talk explores how Byzantium operates as a queer cipher in modern culture, appearing as an adjectival modifier, “the Byzantine,” rather than as a distinct historical referent. Analyzing Gore Vidal’s 1959 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer, Betancourt demonstrates how Byzantine references encode queer identity through the film’s absent protagonist, whose unspeakable sexuality mirrors Byzantium’s own unintelligibility. Drawing on extensive archival research, he shows how “the Byzantine” articulated coded queerness for these writers and artists. This talk proposes reimagining Byzantine art history through modes of “queer fragmentation,” recognizing Byzantine elements across temporal boundaries.

Roland Betancourt is a scholar of Byzantium and modern popular culture with research that lies firmly at the intersection of the history of science and technology, intellectual history, and the history of art. Dr. Betancourt is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC from 2024-2026. He also holds the honor of Chancellor’s Professor, Department of Art History, at the University of California, Irvine. He is also the author of four monographs, including The Secrets We Keep: Hidden Histories of the Byzantine Empire (The Getty, 2024), Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), and Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Betancourt’s forthcoming book, Disneyland and the Rise of Automation: How Technology Created the Happiest Place on Earth (Princeton University Press, 2026), traces the origins and evolution of the theme park’s technical innovations during Disneyland’s first three decades in operation, exploring how engineers reimagined the systems and machines of industrial manufacturing and the military.

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