The Department of Art History and Art offers opportunities to study art history, to participate in a broad range of studio offerings and to engage in pre-professional museum training. The Bachelor of Arts degree is granted in art history and in pre-architecture. In addition, the department offers graduate programs leading to the degrees of Master of Arts in art history, in art history and museum studies; and the Doctor of Philosophy in art history.
All art programs are considerably enhanced by close cooperation with and access to the facilities of cultural institutions located in University Circle, in particular The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Cleveland Institute of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.
The Cleveland Museum of Art/CWRU Art History Program has been in existence since 1967. The museum’s curators serve as adjunct faculty, and graduate research projects under their direction often result in exhibitions and publications. The museum Studies course and internships provide experience in curatorial practices, connoisseurship, conservation, design, and museum education, and the program has a history of producing leaders in the museum field. Graduate students are exposed to both traditional and newer theoretically based art historical approaches in classes taught by faculty renowned for their expertise in a diversity of fields.
News
50th Annual Cleveland Symposium: Moments, Intervals, Epochs
The 50th Annual Cleveland Symposium was a rousing success! The event was co-organized by third-year PhD students Cecily Hughes and Madeline Newquist and presented by the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). The two-day symposium explored...
Reed O’Mara named the 2025-27 Kress Institutional Fellow in Munich
Congratulations to the Department of Art History and Art Ph.D. candidate and Mellon Fellow Reed O’Mara, who has been selected as the 2025-2027 Kress Institutional Fellow at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, Germany. As a Fellow, Reed will conduct research on her dissertation, “Materializing Sacred Language: Picturing and Performing Hebrew in Late Medieval Art.” This extremely competitive fellowship will offer Reed the opportunity to visit museums, libraries, archives, and sites throughout Germany and Austria pertinent to her dissertation, which is being advised by Professor Elina Gertsman. Reed is the second PhD student in the Department to receive this prestigious fellowship; Sam Truman, a PhD candidate in medieval art, is currently completing her 2023-2025 Kress Fellowship at The Courtauld Institute of Art and Warburg Institute in London, UK.
Jillian Kruse awarded Chester Dale Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Congratulations to Jillian Kruse who was awarded the 2025-2026 Chester Dale Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she will be hosted by the Department of Drawings and Prints under the leadership of Dr. Nadine M. Orenstein, Drue Heinz Curator in Charge in the Department of Drawings and Prints. The highly competitive 12-month residential predoctoral fellowship will support her dissertation “Printing Utopia: Experimentation, Collaboration, and Anarchy in the Prints of Camille Pissarro.” The fellowship offers unparalleled access to the Met’s collection and resources as well as opportunities to actively participate in the museum’s larger scholarly community. Jillian will also assist with museum projects relevant to my research under the supervision of Dr. Ashley Dunn, Associate Curator of Drawings and Prints in charge of nineteenth-century French works on paper.
Madalyn Fox named the fifth annual Keithley Fellow in Community-Engaged Art History
Congratulations to Madalyn Fox, a first-year MA candidate in Art History and Museum Studies, who has been named the fifth annual Keithley Fellow in Community-Engaged Art History! Maddy will work with the director of Arts & Culture at Cleveland Public Library on a number of initiatives including the launch of PRISM: Seeing Beyond Mass Incarceration, a multi-disciplinary exhibition across several CPL branches seeking to change the narrative related to mass incarceration in the United States.
A Cultural History of Love in the Middle Ages arrives just in time for Valentine's Day! Co-edited by Barbara H. Rosenwein, prof. Gertsman's co-author on The Middle Ages in 50 Objects, it features prof. Gertsman's article, "Love in Art and Material Culture" that includes several Cleveland Museum of Art...
Faculty Work-in-Progress: Liquid Flesh and the Medicine of Immortality
12:00 pm | Clark Hall Room 206, 11130 Bellflower Road
Embodiment of paradoxes and prophecies, fragmented by metaphors, the heterogeneous, ever-shifting artifact that is the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, could hardly stand further from the natural world. Late antique and Byzantine authors described her womb was the bush that burns and is not consumed, her body as the throne and the altar of God, and her arms as the liturgical spoon. She is a virgin who lactates. Despite her extraordinary qualities, remote from the experiences of womankind, art historians who have attempted to interpret this last facet of a very complex subject – the nursing Virgin Mary – have commonly essentialized it by presenting modern western constructions of nursing and motherhood as ahistorical, self-evident truths that are realized in this image-type. While scholars in many fields have explored the implications of gender theory for well over two decades, little of this work has been directed at Byzantine, and none at Egyptian Christian, art history. The vast distance that separates women engaging in the biologically natural act of nursing from the social construction of a nursing female cult figure shrinks and even disappears in their writings. Elizabeth Bowman, Elsie B. Smith Professor in the Liberal Arts, was motivated by this historiographic pattern and uses this iconographic type as a vehicle for exploring the variability of assemblages of the Virgin Mary Galaktotrophousa, or ‘she who nourishes with milk,’ and her diverse audiences.
An informal lunch will be provided.
Registration is requested. Register HERE.
Byzantium and its Environment
Congratulations to Zoe and Luke on getting their papers accepted to the Oxford University Byzantine Society’s 27th Annual International Graduate Conference! Entitled “Byzantium and its environment,” it will take place on the 1st-2nd March, 2025, at the Faculty of History, George Street, OX1 2BE. The conference will also be available online; please purchase a ticket via Eventbrite here. The full program and abstracts of papers can be found on the OBS website.
Karamu House
Join Prof. Benay and Dr. Salsbury, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the CMA, at the Cleveland Heights Public Library on Monday, Feb. 10!
Rebekah Utian (MA class of ’24) – “Curating the Humanities”
Congratulations to our own Rebekah Utian (MA class of '24), now Cleveland Foundation Fellow in Public Service, on the publication of her article "Curating the Humanities," https://shuddhashar.com/curating-the-humanities/
Grad medievalists present at the Newberry Library
This weekend, third-year doctoral student Rebekkah Hart and second-year MA student Sarah Frisbie traveled to Chicago to participate in the Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference in Pre-Modern Studies at the Newberry Library. Rebekkah served on the conference’s organizing committee and chaired a panel entitled “Oh, When the Saints…” Sarah presented a version of her MA Qualifying Paper, “’One God, One Light, One Cause’: Materialities of Stained Glass in an Auvergnois Trinity” at the panel “Visual Landscape of Faith.” Congratulations to Rebekkah and Sarah! Click below to see more photos.
Facsimile Viewing with Professor Elina Gertsman
Join us for a facsimile viewing session on Wednesday, January 29, at 11 am! Listen to graduate students and faculty talk about illuminated manuscripts — poetry collections, books of hours, festival books — written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Middle High German. All are welcome!