Connie Gagliardi is a PhD student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Professor Valentina Napolitano and Dr. Donna Young. She received her B.A. from McGill University in 2011 and her M.A from the University of Toronto in 2014. Her areas of interests include religious materiality and visual devotions, sainthood and Marianism, and Christianity in the Middle East.

Her current research examines the production of neo-Byzantine iconography in contemporary Palestine and its political, religious implications for local Christian populations. More specifically, her research seeks to understand the pedagogy of “iconography” as it is taught to Palestinian youth, which envelops a biblically-charged narrative and implicates the production of icons within a framework of rewriting their own (Palestinian Christian) history.

Furthermore, that several of these politically-charged icons have become public fixtures within Palestinian public spaces, her research seeks to explore the convergence of publicity and religiosity. The politics of space are intensified within the context of the Israeli occupation; thus, the presence of these politically-charged icons atop the Israeli Separation Wall solicits questions of representation and identity, permanence and violence. What is the mimetic force of restoring the ancient practice of iconography to its place of origin (Bethlehem, via the birth of Jesus), given the current situation of Christianity in the Holy Land, and the Middle East at large?