PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

Jordan Koel earned his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2025 under the direction of Dr. Elizabeth Sears. His dissertation, “Living Legends: Animated Sculpture in the Medieval Imagination, ca. 1000–1350,” sought to elucidate the place of statuary in the medieval imagination by working between stories and statues, between texts and extant classes of sculpture. He is particularly interested in exploring the cultural logics determining attitudes toward artificial bodies which serve as hyperbolic case studies in modes of reaction and interaction with works of art. In “Statue Marriage and Medieval Iconophlilia,” published in a special issue of Different Visions, Jordan examined the colorful trope of statue marriage as an index of changing attitudes to devotional sculpture. Research for this article and the dissertation from which it stems was facilitated by two years spent in London at the Warburg Institute as the Kress Institutional Fellow. As a Mellon post-doctoral fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Jordan is developing a book project based on (but distinct from) his doctoral dissertation.