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Paul Atkins Underwood (1902–1968)

Paul Atkins Underwood was an American architect and art historian of early Christian and Byzantine art. He received his BS and MA degrees in architecture from Princeton University, in 1925 and 1928. Between 1935 and 1938, Underwood was a graduate student in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton. He was a Junior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks between 1943 and 1946, and a resident assistant professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology at Dumbarton Oaks between 1946 and 1951. He was subsequently appointed associate professor in 1951 and full professor in 1960. In the early 1950s, Underwood devoted the majority of his time to the Byzantine Institute in Istanbul, having been appointed field director after the death of the Institute’s founder and director, Thomas Whittemore, in 1950. As the field director for the Institute until his death, on September 22, 1968, Underwood supervised the restoration and conservation work at Hagia Sophia and Kariye Camii in Istanbul.