Dr. Laura Chilson-Parks

Archaeologist & Historian of Art and Architecture of the Middle Ages

Laura Chilson-Parks is interested in the way in which history can open our eyes to alternative ways of experiencing and living in the world. An avid believer in the importance of history, she believes that understanding our past shows us that elements of our reality that feel natural, fixed, and true and are actually constructed, developed, or imagined.

Dr. Chilson-Parks has guided college students through that process of discovery for six years. As a Deans’ Faculty Fellow at Brown University, she developed and taught two courses that she is currently available to teach: “The Lactating, Menstruating Christ: Constructing and Depicting Gender in Late Medieval Europe” and "Inventions and Interpretations of Landscapes in the Middle Ages." Her current book project seeks to bring the the lessons of the first of these classes, “A Lactating Menstruating Christ,” to the general public.

Dr. Chilson-Parks’ scholarship also explores the intersection of architecture, sensory experience, class, gendered bodies, and the augmentation and representation of experiences within the mind through her study of the oratories of Margaret of Flanders, the Duchess of Burgundy at the end of the 14th century. Her ongoing archaeological excavation of the upper chapel at the château de Germolles continues to inform her first book project, Staging Gendered Access to the Divine in Late Medieval Burgundy and Early Modern Flanders explores how the oratories at the Château de Germolles and at the Chartreuse de Champmol, both built by Margaret of Flanders (1350-1405) and Philip the Bold (1342-1400), elicit distinct sensorial experiences, each impacted by the oratories’ specific physical and social contexts, that ultimately use similar methods to access the divine. Dr. Chilson-Parks’ interpretation draws on theoretical discussions on medieval concepts of matter, affective prayer, sacred space, sensory taxonomies, landscape and the environment, and the construction and performance of gender.