Kathryn Dickason

Kathryn Dickason is a scholar and journalist based in Los Angeles. She specializes in Western medieval Christianity, with particular interests in dance, iconography, gender, French literature, Dante, and medievalism. More recently, she has developed a secondary research area in contemporary ecstatic dance.

Dickason holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University and also served as a residential research fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University. Her first book, Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred (Oxford University Press, 2021), explores the sacralization of medieval dance in Western Europe.

Currently, she is writing a long-form profile on Max Fathom, the founder of ecstatic dance, as well as her second book, tentatively entitled Wheeling Incarnation: Medieval Dance in the Visual Arts.

Link to Numen article: https://brill.com/view/journals/nu/72/2-3/article-p207_4.xml Link to magazine article on ecstatic dance that I co-wrote: https://therevealer.org/the-sacred-steps-of-ecstatic-dance/ My LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-dickason/