Brubaker was educated at Pennsylvania State University, USA, where she obtained her BA in 1972 and then an MA in 1976. Brubaker continued on to complete her PhD at Johns Hopkins University. Her PhD thesis was entitled 'The Illustrated Copy of the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus in Paris '. Brubaker was simultaneously employed as an instructor in the Department of Art, Wheaton College, Massachusetts between 1981 and 1983. She became an Assistant and then Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Wheaton College, while also serving as Chair at the college in 1993-94. In 1994, Brubaker moved to the University of Birmingham in England, where she has continued her research and teaching career up until the present day; in 2005, she was appointed as Professor of Byzantine Art History. She arranged to share the position with Dr Ruth Macrides, so enabling both women to do research and "have a life". From 2003, she has served as the Director of the Centre Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham, and from 2005 to 2009 as the Assistant Director of the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity. A festschrift in her honour was published in 2011. Her husband is the Oxford medievalist, Professor Christopher Wickham.
Research
Brubaker began as an expert in Byzantine illuminated manuscripts, writing a pathbreaking book on one manuscript, Paris Grec. 510, in her Vision and Meaning. Her interests have extended since to the cultural history of Iconoclasm and the development of the cult of icons, on which she wrote two now-basic books on the subject with John Haldon. She has written substantially on the relationship between material culture and its visual expressions, and other aspects of cultural history, including visual and textual representations of gender, and female patronage. She has been fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, first in 1980-81 as a Junior Fellow, a Summer Fellow in 1984 and a Spring Fellow in 2001 and 2016. Her research into icons, relics and the proliferation of the cult of the Virgin Mary in Byzantium developed into a major research project subsidized by an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant and the International Iconoclasms network, led by Brubaker with Dr Richard Clay, in collaboration with the Tate Britain.
Publications
Monographs
Vision and meaning in ninth-century Byzantium: Image as exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus in Paris. Pp 489. Reprinted 2001. Re-issued in paperback edition 2008.
Byzantium in the Iconoclast era : The Sources, with JF Haldon. Pp 307.
Gender and the Transformation of the Roman World, 300-900
Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300-900, with J Smith. Pp 333.
Byzantium in the Iconoclast era ca 680 – ca 850: A History, with JF Haldon. Pp xxiv + 917.
The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and Images, with M Cunningham.
Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm
Other articles
'The Tabernacle Miniatures of the Middle Byzantine Octateuchs', Actes du XVe Congrès International d'Etudes Byzantines II, 73‑92.
'Politics, Patronage and Art in Ninth‑Century Byzantium: The Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus in Paris', Dumbarton Oaks Papers 39, 1‑13.
'The Introduction of Painted Initials in Byzantium', Scriptorium 45, 22-46.
'Byzantine Art in the Ninth Century: Theory, Practice, and Culture', Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 13, 23‑93.
'Icons before Iconoclasm?', Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo XLV, 1215-54.
'The Chalke Gate, the construction of the past, and the Trier ivory', Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 23, 258-85.
'The gender of money: Byzantine empresses on coins ', with H Tobler, Gender and History 12, 572-94.
'Memories of Helena: patterns in imperial female matronage in the fourth and fifth centuries', in L James, ed., Women, Men and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium, 52-75.
'Sex, lies and textuality: the Secret History of Prokopios and the rhetoric of gender in sixth-century Byzantium' in L Brubaker and J Smith, ed., Gender in the early medieval world, east and west, 300-900, 83-101.
'Pictures are good to think with: looking at, with, and through Byzantium', in P Odorico et al., eds, L'ecriture de la mémoire. La littérarité de l’historiographie, 221-40.
'Every cliché in the book: the linguistic turn and the text-image discourse in Byzantine manuscripts', in L James, ed., Art and Text in Byzantium, 58-82.
'Critical approaches to art history', in E Jeffreys et al., ed., Oxford handbook of Byzantine Studies, 59-66.
