I’m Blair Apgar (they/them), an Assistant Professor of Art History at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania whose work sits at the intersection of medieval studies, visual culture, and video games. My research focuses on how the Middle Ages are imagined, mediated, and reactivated—from eleventh-century Italy to contemporary digital worlds—paying particular attention to questions of power, gender, materiality, and experience. My doctoral research, completed at the University of York in 2021, centered on Matilda of Canossa, examining her material patronage and its afterlives, and this work now forms the basis of a book project on her material and mythical legacy.

Alongside traditional art-historical research on medieval architecture, manuscripts, and patronage, I examine how modern media—especially video games and virtual reality—shape popular and scholarly understandings of the medieval past. I’m interested in how players encounter history through space, embodiment, and narrative choice, and how these interactive forms both reproduce and challenge long-standing myths about the Middle Ages.