Erica Cruikshank Dodd

Erica Cruikshank Dodd ( Cruikshank; born 1928) is a Canadian academic who has published several studies on Byzantine, Middle Eastern and Islamic art. She was Professor of Byzantine and Islamic Art at American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

Life Erica Cruikshank was born in Beirut, Lebanon, within an academic family. She grew up in the family home that her father, Dr. W. D. Cruikshank, who was Professor of Surgery at the American University of Beirut, had built on the AUB campus.

She graduated from Wellesley College, Massachusetts, with a B.A. in History of Art in 1951, and earned a PhD in Byzantine Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, in 1958. She then went on to undertake post-doctoral training in Islamic Art at the Centre for Middle East Studies, at Harvard University between 1960 and 1963.

She married Peter C. Dodd (19302010), an academic who, like her, taught at the American University of Beirut for 20 years from 1965 to 1985. She lived for many years in Pakistan, where her husband was the Director of the Fulbright Foundation in Islamabad, The book contains photographs of paintings in religious buildings in the Lebanese region collected over a period of 33 years (1971–2004). Of particular importance are the photographs of 1971, which represent a “record of lost paintings”, as most of these deteriorated over the years it took for her research to complete. As Cormak wrote in Speculum, it is "a matter of considerable satisfaction that the key monuments are now accessible in the art-historical literature”.