Roland Betancourt

Roland Betancourt is a scholar of Byzantium and modern popular culture with research that lies firmly at the intersection of the history of science and technology, intellectual history, and the history of art. Dr. Betancourt is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC from 2024-2026. He also holds the honor of Chancellor’s Professor, Department of Art History, at the University of California, Irvine.

In 2023, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2016-2017, he was the Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. At UC, Irvine, he has received two once-in-a-lifetime honors, including a Chancellor’s Fellowship (2019-2022) and a School of Humanities Faculty Teaching Award (2016).

Betancourt’s forthcoming book, Disneyland and the Rise of Automation: How Technology Created the Happiest Place on Earth (Princeton University Press, 2026), traces the origins and evolution of the theme park’s technical innovations during Disneyland’s first three decades in operation, exploring how engineers reimagined the systems and machines of industrial manufacturing and the military. 

He is also the author of four other monographs, including The Secrets We Keep: Hidden Histories of the Byzantine Empire (The Getty, 2024), Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), and Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Byzantine Intersectionality was awarded the Jerome E. Singerman Prize from the Medieval Academy of America and was a finalist for the Award of Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies by the American Academy of Religion.

His work has also looked at the role of Byzantium in the modern world and theoretical approaches to the past, as in his co-edited volumes (with Maria Taroutina) Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity (Brill, 2015) and (with Evan Freeman) Byzantine Materiality (DeGruyter, 2023). He has also co-edited a special issue of Speculum on “Medieval Studies and its Institutions” for the Medieval Academy of America’s Centennial in 2025.

Dr. Betancourt is the Editor for the ICMA Books | Viewpoints series at the Pennsylvania State University Press and for The Middle Ages book series at the University of Pennsylvania Press, as well as a member of the editorial and review boards of YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies, Exemplaria, and Speculum. Dr. Betancourt has also served on the governing boards of the College Art Association (CAA), the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), the Byzantine Studies Association of North America (BSANA), the Medieval Academy of America (MAA), and the Medievalists of Color (MoC) organization. His popular writing on the Middle Ages has appeared in The Washington Post, Scientific American, TIME, The Conversation, Literary Hub, and The Advocate.

Betancourt is working on several ongoing book projects, including Suddenly, Byzantine: Camp, Excess, Aesthetics on queer dialogues between the Byzantine past and modern art, architecture, literature, and popular culture.