Dr. Cathleen Fleck took on the role of Director of the School of Visual Studies in July 2025 after serving for six years as the Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Saint Louis University (SLU). In the latter role, she oversaw programs in Art, Art History, Dance, Music, and Theatre and helped to form a new Arts Council to advocate for the important role of the arts at SLU’s liberal arts campus. Her position at SLU plus her leadership training with Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, International Council for Arts Deans, and the National Association for Schools of Art and Design provided her with tools to work with her department faculty and staff to formulate a new mission and vision, make significant curriculum revisions, and institute deliberate actions for a more accessible and welcoming department.

Dr. Fleck has had various other leadership engagements in academic settings. More recently, Dr. Fleck served as a founding Executive Board member (2021-2024) of SLU’s Center for Research on Global Catholicism, helping to support its mission to support scholarship at the nexus of Catholicism and culture. Dr. Fleck has served on many other university committees, including SLU’s College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Advisory Committee, University and College workload committees, and College Benchmarking committee. She also served as Vice President and President of the Italian Art Society.

Her art historical research encompasses her various interests involving the art of the medieval Mediterranean, including the Middle East and southern Europe. Her book entitled Reimagining Jerusalem’s Architectural Identities in the Later Middle Ages (Brill, 2022) examines how Christians and Muslims in the Crusader era of the Middle Ages (1187–1382) understood Jerusalem’s history and used the representation of its monuments to express shifting Christian and Islamic religious concepts. She is also working on a co-authored volume called Encounters: The Crusades in 50 Objects (Routledge, forthcoming 2026), with essays regarding art and material culture of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish art in the Levant during the European crusader period from 1099–1400. 

Another current project involves the medieval city of Naples, Italy. She is preparing a volume on a beautiful illustrated Neapolitan Bible now in Berlin, the Hamilton Bible, for publication in 2026. This volume relates to her first book The Clement Bible at the Medieval Courts of Naples and Avignon: A Story of Papal Power, Royal Prestige, and Patronage (Ashgate Press, 2010).

She is shifting her research into the modern day for a new project entitled Jerusalem in St. Louis?: Mapping Holy Monuments at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. This work analyzes the large-scale replica of Jerusalem in the St. Louis World’s Fair and how it reflects concepts of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faith in the early twentieth century.

Another aspect of Dr. Fleck’s research has been in areas regarding the arts and pedagogy. She led a project at SLU entitled “Artful Observation” that engaged with pre-medical undergraduate programs in the College of Arts & Sciences and with Physical Therapy graduate students in the Doisy College of Health Sciences and medical students as well. She and her colleagues established curricular and research programs based on evidence-based methods about training with the visual arts to help students develop their attentiveness, descriptive skills, individual and collective awareness, and empathetic capabilities.   

Her interests include:

• Late Medieval European art and architecture
• Islamic art and architecture
• Crusader art and cultural exchange
• History and representations of Jerusalem
• World’s Fairs in St. Louis and beyond
• Medieval court art
• Medieval European and Islamic manuscripts
• History of medical illustration
• Pedagogy and the arts

Publications and Media Placements

Books

• Co-author with Elizabeth Lapina, Richard A. Leson, and Vardit R. Shotten-Hallel. Encounters: The Crusades in 50 Objects. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, forthcoming 2026.
• The Hamilton Bible. Magic Moments of mankind series. Sinnbach am Inn: Verlag Müller and Schindler, forthcoming 2026.
• Reimagining Jerusalem's Architectural Identities in the Later Middle Ages.  Leiden: Brill, 2022.
• The Clement Bible at the Medieval Courts of Naples and Avignon: A Story of Papal Power, Royal Prestige, and Patronage. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2010.

Articles

• “Reuse of Architecture and Architectural Sculpture: Franks, Ayyubids, Mamluks,” Material Culture of the Crusader States, Eds. Adrian Boas and Elizabeth Lapina (London: Taylor & Francis Group, forthcoming 2025).
• "Art of an Emblematic King: Robert I of Naples as King of Jerusalem in the Fourteenth Century." In New Horizons in Trecento Italian Art, eds. Bryan C. Keene and Karl Whittington. Trecento Forum, 247-261. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2020.
• "Signs of Leadership: Buildings of Jerusalem in a Crusader Relief." In Crusading in Art, Thought, and Will, eds. Anne Romine, Ben Halliburton and Matthew E. Parker. Medieval Mediterranean Series, 37-67. Leiden: Brill, 2018.
• "Review of Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People under Heaven, eds. Barbara Boehm and Melanie Holcomb, catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition 2016 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016)." Jewish Quarterly Review 108, no. 4 (2018): 562-568.
• "The Crusader Loss of Jerusalem in the Eyes of a Thirteenth-Century Virtual Pilgrim," in The Crusades and Visual Culture, Eds. Laura Whatley, April Morris, Susanna Throop, and Elizabeth Lapina (Farnham, Surrey, England/Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, forthcoming 2015
• "The Luxury Riccardiana Psalter in the Thirteenth Century: A Nun's Prayerbook?" Viator 46/1 (2015), 135-160.
• "Crusader Spolia in Medieval Cairo. The Portal of the Complex of Sultan Ḥasan," Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies, I/2 (Dec. 2014), 249-300.
• "'Vergine madre pia': Text and Image in a Medieval Psalter in a Renaissance Dominican Convent," Source: Notes in the History of Art, XXXIV/2 (2015), 5-13.
• "The rise of the court artist: Cavallini and Giotto in 14th-c. Naples," Published in Art History (2008): 460-83 and in Art and Architecture in the Kingdom of Naples, 1266-1713: New Approaches. Eds. C. Warr and J. Elliott. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010: 38-61.
• "Seeking Legitimacy: Art and Manuscripts for the Popes in Avignon from 1378-1417," A Companion to the Great Western Schism. Eds. Joëlle Rollo-Koster and Thomas Izbicki. Brill, 2009: 239-302.

Honors and Awards

Faculty Fellow, Reinert Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, Saint Louis University, 2023-24

CREST (Center for Culture, Religion, Ethics, Science and Technology) Research Center Fellow, Saint Louis University, 2024-25: Community of Scholars with theme “The Spatial Turn: Mapping the Terrain of Geospatial Science and the Humanities” for the project “Jerusalem in St. Louis.”

Professional Organizations and Associations:

• Member, International Council for Arts Deans
• Member, National Council of Arts Administrators
• Member, Advisory Board, Saint Louis University Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies (2010-2025)
• Member, Italian Art Society (President, 2013-2015)
• Member, International Center of Medieval Art (Board member, 2018-2021)
• Member, College Art Association
• Member, Historians of Islamic Art Association
• Member, Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East