Catherine McNally

Catherine is a third-year PhD student in the History, Theory, Criticism of Art and Architecture program and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. With a primary focus on Late Antique Jerusalem, her research explores the spatial production of sacred geography and the interchange between Christianity and Islam through material culture. Prior to MIT, she received an MPhil (distinction) in Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Oxford and a BA (Hons) cum laude in Classics from the University of Pennsylvania with minors in Art History and Legal Studies in addition to a certificate in Arabic. Between Penn and Oxford, she was awarded the 2019 Gordon Junior Fellowship to teach at Winchester College in the UK and then returned stateside to work in the education and art industry in New York. During her time at Oxford, she worked as a digital encoder for the Invisible East project and interned at the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens, Greece. Her interests lie in the realm of cross-confessionalism and its manifestation through architectural ornamentation in the regions of Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, and Palestine. In addition to her academic endeavors, she also serves as the Graduate Community Fellow with Radius and writes periodically on her travels throughout the Middle East found on her Substack @hierophainomenon.