Dr. Ariel Fein earned her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University, where she wrote her dissertation on the Martorana Church and the Arab-Christian built environment of Norman Sicily. Her scholarship explores the intersection of Christian and Islamic visual cultures, in particular the circulation of objects, peoples, and ideas across the frontier zones of the Mediterranean. Other research interests include: the arts of medieval Arab-Christians, identity negotiation and cultural memory in the post-Byzantine diaspora, and Jewish ceremonial art and architecture, with a particular focus on the Jewish communities of the 19th- and 20th-century Middle East.