Virginia Raguin

Both in teaching and scholarship, I am interested in religious art of all kinds, patterns of collecting, and intersections of the visual image and written culture. I edited Art, Piety, and Destruction in the Christian West, 1500-1700, Ashgate, 2010 and also worked with Sarah Stanbury, Department of English, to photograph East Anglian churches and guild halls to explore the physical context of medieval literary figures such as Julian of Norwich (Revelations) William Langland (Piers Plowman) Margery Kempe (The Book of Margery Kempe) and John Lydgate (poetry). See the website: Mapping Margery Kempe. I have team-taught with many other professors in Music, History, and Literature. We actually created light installations that reflected the diminishing hours of darkness and increasing hours of light leading to the March Equinox. For three years, from 2012-15, I mentored students for a week in Cologne, where in addition to churches and museums, my German colleagues in stained glass provided an intensive tour of the restoration studio of the cathedral.

Many of my publications focus on stained glass, both historic and modern, as in Stained Glass from its Origins to the Present with Abrams (USA) and Thames and Hudson (GB) in 2003. A member of the International Corpus Vitrearum, I have co-authored Stained Glass before 1700 in the Midwest United States (Harvey Miller Press, London, 2002) and authored Stained Glass before 1700 in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum, 2 volumes, Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium 2024. In 2023 Reaktion Books, London, published The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Time [12 case studies of architectural glazing for the general reader). Another general audience book is Stained Glass: Radiant Art, a guide to the collection of medieval and Renaissance Stained Glass in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2013. From an experience of over 40 years of collaborative exchange with colleague in 20 countries, I've been deeply involved in questions of conservation and the commitment of maintaining historic sites as essential aspects of culture.

My museum exhibits have included Glory in Glass: Stained Glass in the United States: Origin, Variety and Preservation 1998-99, and Reflections on Glass: 20th Century Stained Glass in American Art and Architecture, 2002-03, at the Gallery at the American Bible Society, Catholic Collecting, Catholic Reflection 1538-1850: Objects as a measure of reflection on a Catholic past and the construction of recusant identity in England and America: Cantor Gallery, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, 2006. Most recently I organized Pilgrimage and Faith: Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, a traveling exhibition with venues in Worcester, Chicago, Richmond, and The Rubin Museum of Art, New York, from 2010 through 2011. I was thrilled to write the catalogue essay for Kiki Smith's exhibition in the Pace Gallery, New York: Kiki Smith: Lodestar, 2010.