Michael Camille


Michael Camille, Mary L. Block Professor at the University of Chicago, was an influential and provocative art historian who specialized in the European Middle Ages.
In The New York Times obituary of Michael Camille, The New York Times writes, "Mr. Camille was noted for bringing contemporary critical theory and social perspectives to the study of medieval art. Using anthropological, psychoanalytic, semiotic and other approaches, as well as traditional art historical methods, he described the Middle Ages as a time of complex social and political ferment with similarities to modern experience." Camille's new approach marked "a departure from the more popular conception of the period as a remote and static 'age of faith.'
The New York Times obituary of Michael Camille is titled "Michael Camille, an influential and provocative scholar of medieval art at the University of Chicago, died on April 29. He was 44."
"Camille's first article in the English journal Art History brought him immediate attention." Camille applied himself to "the traditional field of medieval manuscript illumination," but with new perspectives.
His work is translated into "Spanish, French, Japanese, and Korean," and his book Image on the Edge "was reviewed by publications ranging from the Burlington Magazine to the Wall Street Journal.''"

Life

Michael Camille was born in Keighley, Yorkshire, on 6 March 1958. He studied English and Art History at Peterhouse, Cambridge, graduating with a first class honours degree in 1980 and with a PhD in 1985.
Immediately after obtaining his doctorate he began work at the University of Chicago, where he remained for the rest of his short career. He was best known for applying post-structuralist ideas to questions of medieval art history. In 1996 he visited Medieval Times with Ira Glass for a segment of This American Life. In 2001 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
He died of a brain tumor on 29 April 2002.

Works