In April 2015 the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University mounted an international conference on the icons at the Monastery of St. Catherine's on Mount Sinai (A New Look: Sinai and its Icons in Light of the Digitization of the Weitzmann Archive).
The meeting was organized by Charles Barber (Professor of Early Christian & Byzantine Art) and Trudy Jacoby (Visual Resources Curator) and celebrated the digitization of the archive of photographs of Sinai's icons that was produced in the course of the Princeton-Michigan-Alexandria expeditions to the monastery from 1958-65. This archive, long in the care of the eminent Byzantinist Kurt Weitzmann, is now becoming available to a wider audience:
This endeavor has been spearheaded by Trudy Jacoby and has been developed with the full support of the Sinai community. The publication of this material should encourage significant fresh scholarship. This became obvious to all those who attended the conference - http://www.princeton.edu/visualresources/sinai-and-its-icons/. The one hundred and fifteen registrants heard eleven papers that covered a huge range of topics: the nature of the collection and the archive, restoration and conservation issues, the expeditions to the monastery, as well as discussions of the icon from Late Antiquity through to the Early Modern era.
It was a stimulating, indeed exciting meeting that was anchored by the annual Kurt Weitzmann lecture, which was delivered by Robin Cormack and discussed the history of expeditions to Sinai before Weitzmann and George Forsyth undertook their studies of the monastery. The papers from this conference will be published together in a book.