Kathryn Dickason

Kathryn Dickason is a Visiting Scholar in the School of Religion at the University of Southern California. Previously she was a postdoctoral scholar at USC, with a joint appointment in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities and the School of Religion. She specializes in Western medieval Christianity (c. 1200-1450), with particular interests in performance, iconography, gender, mysticism, embodiment, dance history, French literature, Dante, and medievalism. Her first book, Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred, explores the authorization of medieval dance in Western Europe, investigating how dance, under the auspices of the Latin Church, became a legitimate form of religious devotion and expression, circa 1200-1450. This work illuminates a hitherto neglected area of medieval religious scholarship, and contributes to, and complicates, our understanding of the role of the body in religious thought and practice. The book was published in January 2021 with Oxford University Press's Studies in Historical Theology series. She is currently writing her second book on Western medieval dance iconography.