Mariah Proctor-Tiffany

Mariah Proctor-Tiffany teaches the history of medieval and Islamic art and architecture at California State University, Long Beach. She has been the recipient of numerous research fellowships, including a Samuel H. Kress Travel Fellowship, a Manning Fellowship, a Samuel H. Kress/International Center of Medieval Art book research award, and an Andrew W. Mellon Art History Publication Initiative grant through Pennsylvania State University Press. She earned her PhD. in the history of art and architecture at Brown University.

Her book, Medieval Art in Motion: The Inventory and Gift Giving of Queen Clémence de Hongrie, through Pennsylvania State University Press, explores art and the performance of identity by women in fourteenth-century courts, arguing that women, often separated from their loved ones by politically advantageous marriages, maintained their relationships through international gifts of sculptures, reliquaries, textiles, jewels, and manuscripts. The luxurious objects that women circulated testified to the women’s identities, strengthening their claims to income and political power.

She has co-edited a volume of essays with Tracy Chapman Hamilton entitled Moving Women Moving Objects (400-1500). Additionally, she studies the patronage of another female collector, Doris Duke, and her Islamic art collection at Shangri La, Duke’s home in Hawaiʻi. Dr. Proctor-Tiffany was also a fellow at the Samuel H. Kress Digital Mapping and Art History Institute at Middlebury College, and she is creating digital resources to support her work both in the Middle Ages and the twentieth century.