Please join us in congratulating Professor Elina Gertsman, Distinguished University Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, on the publication of L’hypothèse abstraite – Écart, excès d’image au Moyen Âge, co-authored with Dr. Vincent Debiais (EHESS)! The book is the culmination of their collaborative project on abstraction in medieval art, which had its genesis in the French-American Cultural Exchange Foundation grant, and resulted in a series of publications, workshops, and symposia held on both sides of the Atlantic.  L’hypothèse abstraite explores abstraction as a mode of representation in medieval images that seek to figure unrepresentable truths. Its focus is on the intellectual process of abstraction as the means of accessing knowledge that lies beyond the senses and trips up operations of cognition and perception. The book does not posit medieval abstraction as a reaction to figuration; on the contrary, abstraction is seen as the driving force of figuration, which emphasizes the effects of representation and establishes the image as an image. It is the testimony to a visual process that frees itself from mimesis in favor of a poetics of the gap, engaging with the world that is complex and subtle — the process that undermines the fragile equivalences between what we see and what we know. The preface to the book was authored by Herbert L. Kessler. Read excerpts at https://www.lespressesdureel.com/EN/ouvrage.php?id=12356&menu=0