Esteemed scholars to join ISM faculty in 2026-2027 academic year

The Yale Institute of Sacred Music is thrilled to announce that Professors Felicity Harley and Andrew McGowan will join its faculty fully in the 2026-27 academic year. This continues in a deeper and more ongoing way the outstanding teaching and research in the history of early Christian art that Professor Harley has done at Yale in partnership with Yale Divinity School and the ISM, and it also provides an ongoing academic home for Professor McGowan as scholar of early Christian and liturgical studies when he completes twelve years of transformational work as Dean of Berkeley Divinity School.    

In addition to having been dean and president of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, Andrew McGowan is the J.L. Caldwell McFaddin and Rosine B. McFaddin Professor of Anglican Studies at Yale Divinity School. He is an Anglican priest and respected historian whose work focuses on the life of early Christian communities and their ritual practices, and on aspects of contemporary Anglicanism. His scholarly output includes authorship or editorship of six books: Seven Last Words: Creation and Cross (2021); Ancient and Modern: Anglican Essays on the Bible, the Church, and the World (2015); Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective (2014); Method and Meaning: Essays on New Testament Interpretation in Honor of Harold W. Attridge, ed. Andrew B. McGowan and Kent Harold Richards (2012); God in Early Christian Thought: Essays in Memory of Lloyd G. Patterson, ed. Andrew B. McGowan, Tim Gaden, and Brian E. Daley (2009); and Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (1999). Before coming to Yale, Dean McGowan was warden of Trinity College at the University of Melbourne. He was also a member of the General Synod of the Australian Anglican Church and of its Doctrine Commission, contributing to published conversations on environmental theology, restorative justice, and the theology of worship, and was editor of the Journal of Anglican Studies for ten years. His sermons have been published in Ancient and Modern (Wipf and Stock 2015) and in Seven Last Words: Cross and Creation (Cascade 2021). This term, Dean McGowan will teach the course Books of Common Prayer: Anglican Liturgy in History, Theology, and Practice. 

Felicity Harley is an art historian whose work centers on the origins and development of Christian iconography within the visual culture of Roman late antiquity. She has held research fellowships at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and the British School at Rome; and before coming to Yale was the Gerry Higgins Lecturer in Medieval Art History at the University of Melbourne. Dr. Harley has specific expertise in the origins and development of crucifixion iconography in the late antique period. Her publications include the volume Ernst Kitzinger and the Making of Medieval Art History, ed. Felicity Harley and Henry Maguire (2017), and influential studies on topics ranging from Roman graffiti to early representations of the Passion. At Yale she has developed collections-intensive courses with the Beinecke and Divinity School libraries. She works closely with the Yale University Art Gallery’s collection of wall paintings excavated at the ancient site of Dura Europos, Syria, and currently serves as a member of the Advisory Board for the International Dura-Europos Archive. A respected and beloved teacher, she was a 2022 recipient of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Status of Women in the Profession Outstanding Service in Mentoring Award. Dr. Harley’s current course offering is Origins of Christian Art in Late Antiquity. 

Of the two professors, ISM director Martin Jean says that Harley and McGowan have become “indispensable university resources during their time here, having built relationships with departments, schools, and collections all around Yale. I am so pleased they will remain here and continue the wonderful work they’ve begun.”