1. Towards an Alternative ‘Reading’ of the Last Judgement
2. The Deconstruction of Time and Space: Immersive Experiences of Judgement: The Chora Parekklesion
3. Use, Agency and the Formulation of the Image: Yılanlı Kilise
4. Experiencing the ‘Byzantine’ Last Judgement in the Latin West: Torcello
5. The Mnemonic Experience of Judgement: The Sinai Hexaptych
6. The Embodied Experience of Judgement: Mavriotissa Monastery
7. The Gendered Experience of Heaven and Hell: Yılanlı Kilise and the Kokkinobaphos Manuscripts
8. The Rhetoric of Judgement: A Twelfth-century Icon from Mount Sinai
Biography
Niamh Bhalla is Course Leader and Lecturer in Art History at New College of the Humanities, Northeastern University in London. She completed her PhD at The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK, and has previously lectured and worked on research projects at The Courtauld and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her research focuses on the social agency of late-classical and Byzantine imagery. She explores themes such as space, memory, the body, gender and rhetoric in relation to the experience of visual imagery.
‘The Last Judgment is one of the most versatile images in Byzantine iconography. Its diverse sources constitute a pastiche of biblical references, hagiographical accounts, and texts of apocalyptic nature, to be found in both Christian dogma and widespread popular attitudes and beliefs … Niamh Bhalla undertook and accomplished, with notable success, a particularly difficult task; her monograph constitutes the first, at least to my knowledge, comprehensive in-depth study of the function, power and agency of the Last Judgement imagery in Byzantium on various levels, emotional, mnemonic, gendered, socio-historical, didactic and rhetorical, as an immersive personal and shared experience that informs the identities of the individuals and the communities to which it is addressed. In this light, it constitutes an excellent contribution to the field and a landmark publication on the topic’ - Byzantinische Zeitschrift Bd. 115/3, 2022.
