Julian Wood

My research, co-funded by an AHRC OOC DTP Studentship and a Cambridge Vice Chancellor's Award, examines the destruction of religious images in the 7th-9th century Middle East. The focus is on how iconoclastic practices functioned as creative acts that reveal inter and intra-religious dynamics during a period of profound change.
The project, supervised by Peter Sarris, centres on the role of colour. Colour appears throughout our source material for both medieval Byzantium and the Islamic caliphate during this period. This was not only on artefacts, but in the fierce theological disputes which come down to us in a range of fascinating, often challenging fragments. My PhD synthesises these for the first time, and explores how colour might function as a bridge into a world of religious conflict which continues to influence practices today.
Prior to coming to Cambridge, I obtained my BA and MPhil degrees at the University of Oxford. There I researched stories of miracle-working sacred images in the earliest Christian texts in Arabic. Originally from Leeds, I also maintain a key interest in access and outreach work while here at Cambridge.