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Walton Yan, AB'25, studied Byzantine Art while attending University of Chicago

UChicago News recently published their annual piece featuring upcoming graduates, "Class of 2025 reflects on the many roads to Convocation." This year's round-up featured Walton Yan, a triple major in Religious Studies, Germanic Studies, and Art History. Find the excerpt below: 

Walton Yan arrived at UChicago with a fascination for the past—and quickly immersed himself in the religious art and artifacts of ancient Greece and Byzantium.  

A triple major in religious studies, art history and Germanic studies, Yan centered his experience in the College around pre-modern Greek art, combining art, theology and cultural memory in his research.  

One of the most formative experiences of this time was a 2024 summer research trip to Germany, Italy and Greece, funded by the College’s Jonathan Z. Smith and Charles Gray fellowships. With the guidance of his advisor, Assoc. Prof. Karin Krause, Yan traveled to Mount Athos, a monastic peninsula in northeastern Greece that has been a center of Orthodox Christian devotion for more than a thousand years.  

There, he lived among monks at St. Gregorios Monastery, attending the Divine Liturgy and experiencing sacred art not as static museum objects, but as living presences embedded in ritual, devotion and community. 

“I was struck not just by what I was seeing, but how I was seeing,” Yan said. “Icons weren’t merely viewed—they were kissed, touched, approached with reverence. The art came alive in ways that fundamentally changed how I think about religious images.” 

This fall, Yan will begin his Ph.D. in the history of art at Yale University, where he plans to continue his research on Greek and Byzantine art. He describes UChicago, home to the world-renowned Divinity School, as an unparalleled place to pursue big questions. 

“It’s not just that the University taught me to think. It taught me how to listen, especially to voices from the past that still shape our world today,” he said. “There is an urgency to this work—especially in moments of global crisis—because the past often speaks when we are at a loss for words.”

Read the full story here: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/class-2025-reflects-many-roads-convocation