Department: Art, Archaeology

Faculty at the College are encouraged to transform their teaching and learning by engaging their students in active learning spaces. We are pleased to share faculty stories that illustrate the impact of their teaching. 

Fotini Kondyli is Assistant Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology. Her research centers on Byzantine and Frankish material culture, the construction of Byzantine spaces, communal identity, household archaeology and Byzantine non-elites. As an active field archaeologist, Fotini has worked in numerous archaeological sites in Greece, Albania, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Germany. She is currently doing fieldwork at Athens and Thebes as part of her new research project on the negotiation of identities in Byzantine cities. Bringing together legacy data from old excavations and newly excavated sites, she works on reconstructing parts of Athens and Thebes' spatial layout and architecture in the Middle and Late Byzantine/Frankish periods. She particularly focuses on the study of neighborhoods as key loci of social interaction and identity formation.

At UVA, Fotini teaches courses on Late Antique and Byzantine art and material culture, as well as on cross-cultural artistic and economic interaction in the Medieval Mediterranean. She participated in an active learning teaching group with A&S Learning Design & Technology at the Course Design Institute. In this conversation, she shares how her experience lead her to design her course, in which students learned how to create their own research, using different technologies.