Rate My Professor Nancy Wicker

Nancy Wicker is the Distinguished Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Mississippi, a position she has held since joining the faculty in 2003. A first-generation college graduate, she earned her B.A. with high honors from Eastern Illinois University, completing a double major in art history and art studio as a National Merit Scholar. She received her M.A. in art history and Ph.D. in interdisciplinary Ancient Studies—integrating art history, archaeology, and Germanic philology—from the University of Minnesota. Prior to her appointment at Ole Miss, Wicker served as Professor of Art History and Director of Scandinavian Studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She has also been a Visiting Professor at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Dr. Wicker's academic interests center on the art and archaeology of early medieval Scandinavia, spanning the Migration Period of the fifth and sixth centuries through the Viking Age (c. 750–1100). Her research examines Viking-Age art, particularly gold bracteates worn by elite women, the sensory effects of jewelry, female infanticide, runic literacy, and the reception of Roman art in Scandinavia. She has participated in archaeological excavations at sites including the UNESCO World Heritage Viking trading center of Birka in Sweden. As co-director of the international digital humanities Project Andvari, she is creating an iconographic thesaurus of northern European art from the 4th to 12th centuries, supported by grants from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wicker's contributions have earned her the university's Distinguished Professor title in 2024 and the Hensley Family Senior Professor Research Award from the College of Liberal Arts. She is the first woman elected to foreign membership in the Philosophical-Historical Section of Sweden's Royal Society of Humanities at Uppsala and the first American in the International Sachsen Symposium. Additional honors include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Humanities Center, Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, and National Endowment for the Humanities. She has co-edited three books on gender and archaeology—Situating Gender in European Archaeologies (2010), Gender and the Archaeology of Death, and From the Ground Up: Beyond Gender Theory in Archaeology—and published over 40 articles, including "Dazzle, Dangle, and Jangle: Sensory Effects of Scandinavian Gold Bracteates" (2020), "New Investigations of Migration Period Scandinavian Gold Bracteates" (2021), and "Christianization, Female Infanticide, and the Abundance of Female Burials at Viking Age Birka in Sweden" (2012). Her influence extends through over 200 presentations in 21 countries, service on the Board of Directors of the International Center of Medieval Art, past presidency of the Society of Historians of Scandinavia, and editorial roles for Medieval Archaeology and Gesta.