MEDFORD, Mass. — Dr. Kate Franklin will start as Associate Professor of Armenian Art, History and Architecture in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Tufts University this September, according to a post in May on her Instagram account.
Franklin declared in her post: “I am so happy to announce that as of September I will be Associate Professor of Armenian Art History and Architecture in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Tufts University. I am deeply honored to take up this post which was made possible by the American Armenian community, and to continue the legacy of the brilliant women who came before me.”
Franklin holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago (2014), an M.Phil. degree in archaeology from the University of Cambridge (2006), and a bachelor’s degree in archaeological studies from Yale University (2005).
Until recently, she was a senior lecturer at the School of Historical Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published Everyday Cosmopolitanism: Living the Silk Road in Medieval Armenia in 2021 (University of California Press), and Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages, together with Michael Bintley, in 2024 (Routledge).
She writes on her Birkbeck staff profile webpage: “I am an archaeologist of medieval Armenia and the Caucasus and an indiscriminate enthusiast of speculative fiction, cuisine, and vintage textiles. I have been working on collaborative projects in the Republic of Armenia for a decade, exploring the ways that local politics and Silk Road culture were tangled together in landscape and space-time.”
Franklin adds, “…I am curious about the experiences of medieval travel, intimacies of medieval embodiment, and the profound and mundane practices of medieval and early modern hospitality. I am field co-director of a project that combines thinking about routes and infrastructure, contemplating ‘domestic’ space, and appreciating the canyon landscapes of Vayots Dzor, Armenia. … My work at the moment is concerned with world-making as a locus of politics, with material culture as a mediator of spatio-temporal distances, and with the interpenetration of literary and ‘real’ landscapes in archaeological work.”
