Catherine McNally

Catherine is a doctoral candidate 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 dissertation explores the spatial production of sacred geography and the interchange between Christianity and Islam via the built environment of the Byzantine-Sasanian frontier. 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 Syro-Palestine for which she has been received multiple grants to pursue such archival work. Most recently, she was awarded the Kristen Ellen Finnegan Awad by her department. In addition to her academic endeavors, she also served as the 2025-2026 Graduate Community Fellow with Radius and writes periodically on her travels throughout the Middle East found on her Substack @hierophainomenon.