Current and former grad students rock Medieval Academy Meeting

For the second year in a row, graduate medievalists stole the show at the MAA’s annual meeting, earning themselves, to borrow from the meeting’s attendees, “a legendary status.” On Friday, March 24, as Professor Gertsman was being given the award for Excellence in Teaching Medieval Studies, signs and pompoms erupted from the audience, wielded by Zoe Appleby, Reed O’Mara, Lauren Maceross (Art History, MA’13, now PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins), and Rachel McNellis (Music, PhD’19). Last year, during the Fellow induction ceremony, Reed was joined by Sam Truman, Marina Savchenkova, and Angie Verduci all of whom brought much-lauded conviviality and delight (and stunning posters) to the gathering, with the result that Prof. Gertsman does not possess a single photo of herself from that momentous event where she is not laughing.