College of Arts and Sciences

Just two more weeks to see Prof. Elina Gertsman’s and Dr. Gerhard Lutz’s Creation, Birth, and Rebirth show, which was a central feature in this issue of art/sci magazine, and was reviewed in the print version of Plain Dealer and on cleveland.com. The feature highlights the collaboration between the program and the museum, as well as the role of graduate students in the making of the show and writing its didactics. The magazine, in its new online format, further links to the December interview with Prof. Maggie Popkin about the NEH Public Scholars award given in support of her new book on souvenirs, and announces international symposia convened by Prof. Elizabeth Bolman and Reed O’Mara.

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2026 International Congress on Medieval Studies

May 14 – 16, 2026  |  Kalamazoo, MI

Organizers: Elina Gertsman (Case Western Reserve) and Nikki DeLuca (University of Vermont)

Cherubim of the Ark, Nicanor’s Gates, the Grail, the reliquary of Sainte Foy: metal objects, real and imaginary, imbued with magic or channeling the miraculous, haunt the long history of medieval art. This session seeks to inquire into material significance of metals, and we invite papers that explore a broad array of themes knotted around their physical and allegorical properties. Topics may include but are not limited to semiotics of metal artefacts; metaphysics of metals; metal’s material relationship with other substances, such as earth or stone; metal visualized in other media; metals and alchemy; metals and cosmology; metals and the supernatural; and metals in prophetic and eschatological discourses. Interdisciplinary approaches are welcome, but the heart of the session lies in its focus on the visual universe of metals manifested as objects: extant, described, or evoked.

Submit your abstract by September 15 here!

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Tracing Jewish Histories blog post is now live! In addition to a detailed description of the Courtauld conference, it contains a link to recordings of both days of talks. Read it here! Once again, congratulations to Reed on organizing this fantastic endeavor and to Sam, Claudia, Sarah, Tess, Darren, and Alli for chairing and moderating!

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Scholars and curators of medieval and early modern Jewish art, museology, and provenance convened in London two weeks ago to participate in the international two-day symposium Tracing Jewish Histories: The Long Lives of Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts, Judaica, and Architecture. The symposium took place in London at The Courtauld Institute of Art and was co-organized by Reed O’Mara (Mellon Fellow and PhD candidate at CWRU) and Laura Feigen (PhD candidate at The Courtauld). As a part of the program, speakers were invited to handle Judaica from the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum with V&A curator Alice Minter. The symposium covered a wide array of subjects, from synagogue architecture to manuscript illumination to the curation and collecting of Judaica, uncovering the complex histories of studying historic Jewish objects and spaces. CWRU and Courtauld graduate students took on roles as chairs and moderators for sessions, and Professor Elina Gertsman served as the primary advisor to Reed and Laura throughout the course of their symposium planning. The symposium was sponsored by the Department of Art History and Art at CWRU, Sam Fogg, the Mellon Foundation, and The Medieval Academy of America Graduate Student Committee Grant for Innovation in Community Building and Professionalization. A recording of the symposium will go live on The Courtauld’s website in the next week!

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It was a true privilege to shepherd the department during this academic year. Despite all the complexities, we have accomplished astonishing things! Both our faculty members and our graduate students garnered extremely competitive fellowships and awards, organized international conferences, spoke at a broad variety of venues, published widely, and curated exhibitions. Our studio artists, in turn, exhibited their work across the United States. Our lecture series brought extraordinary scholars to campus; the Graduate Association for Medieval Studies and the Undergraduate Art History Club held a series of fabulous events; and the Cleveland Symposium, which celebrated its 50^th anniversary, was a rousing success.

This year two new faculty members joined our ranks, and we are excited to welcome a new colleague, a specialist in medieval Japanese art, in the fall. Congratulations to our BA and MA graduates, and kudos to our PhD students who secured important curatorial appointments this year! In turn, Barney Taxel retired at the conclusion of this semester, and we are tremendously grateful for his years of service to the Art Studio program.

It was wonderful to celebrate everyone at our end-of-the-year party. I hope you have a magnificent conclusion to this academic year and a glorious summer!

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Members of the CWRU community took the International Congress on Medieval Studies by storm! Rebekkah Hart and Cecily Hughes co-organized a session “Scales of Devotion,” which featured a talk by Gerhard Lutz; Reed O’Mara led an online session on Jewish Women in the Middle Ages; Sarah Frisbie organized two sessions on medieval graffiti; and Prof. Gertsman put together two sessions on medieval materialities, one of which featured Zoe Appleby’s paper on Palermo’s lava stones. Tess Artis, Cecily, Sarah, and Rebekkah also presented papers in various sessions: on the CMA’s macabre double portrait, on sacrament niches, on the Beatus apocalypse, and on the seven sacraments fonts, respectively. Claudia Haines, Anna Farber, Rachel Sweeney as well as Sarah, Rebekkah, and Cecily helped prof. Gertsman run a day-long set of Immersive Realms HoloLens demos, brought to Kalamazoo by the fabulous Peter Gao and Anna Faxon. The gang was joined, at various times, by the alumni Laura Rybicki and Julia LaPlaca, and KSL’s digital preservation librarian and an avid member of GAMS Alyssa Pierce. And the famous book exhibit was greatly enriched by the presence of Nikki DeLuca’s freshly published book on shadows in medieval manuscripts!

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