Art History students swept the grad awards this year! Cecily Hughes was named winner of this year’s Ruth Barber Moon Award, while Megan Alves and Claudia Haines were honored with Graduate Dean’s Instructional Excellence awards; Claire Sumner received the Pancoast; and Sarah Frisbie, Luke Hester, and Jillian Kruse received Friends of Art departmental awards. Congratulations to the winners!
The Department of Art History and Art is delighted to announce the hire of Dr. Rachel Quist, who will be joining CWRU in the fall. Dr. Quist specializes in Buddhist visual culture of medieval Japan, and is especially interested in the interactions between Buddhist icons, their worshipers, and their natural environs. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Kansas with the dissertation “Forging Bonds through Icons and Ritual: Imperial Patronage of Daigoji,” which illuminates the centrality of sculptural icons within the complex interplay of medicinal rituals, imperial politics, and the cosmic worldview of premodern Japan.
Congratulations to our Mellon Fellow Reed O’Mara who, with her co-convenor Laura Feigen (the Courtauld), received the grant that will further support this international symposium that brings together fabulous speakers from all over the world and features a curatorial panel on the acquisition and display of Jewish material culture in museums.
Join us for the Provost’s Forum for Breaking Boundaries, where Professor Elina Gertsman and Maggie Popkin will present their ground-breaking research into mixed-reality modeling and their collaborative work with institutions across campus! More information on the event here.
We are utterly delighted to announce that our very own alumna Dr. Nikki DeLuca just published her first book, Shades of Meaning: Shadows in Medieval Manuscript Illumination. Through the lens of fifteenth-century manuscript painting, the book investigates visual, metaphorical, and supernatural shadows in art to discover what they meant to the medieval viewer. Click here to go to the table of contents, acknowledgments, and other preliminary matter — and look out for copies at the KSL and the Ingalls!
Congratulations to Vivian Lewis, our very own graduate and now an MA student in library science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who presented a version of her BA capstone, “Stronger Than Lions: Meaning-Making in a Medieval Jewish Aquamanile,” at the 24th Annual Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies, co-hosted this year by UNC and Duke! This was a full-circle event for Vivian, who chaired a session as an undergraduate when CWRU hosted Vagantes just a few years ago. Vivian’s paper examined the Walters aquamanile, a rare 13th-century bronze lion-shaped vessel inscribed with a Hebrew prayer, to uncover a nuanced narrative of Jewish identity, resilience, and cultural adaptation in medieval Europe. One of the conference attendees, a fellow of the Medieval Academy, wrote to Prof. Gertsman about Vivian’s wonderful “presentation and contextualization of this amazing piece,” and added that “the depth of knowledge apparent in her answers to questions was truly impressive.” Well done, Vivian!
Cecily Hughes, third-year PhD student in medieval art, was awarded the coveted Graduate Student Paper Prize by the Medieval Academy of America! Cecily presented her award-winning paper, “A Place to Shine: Darkness and Light in a Medieval Swedish Sacrament Niche,” in the New Perspectives on Medieval Scandinavia session held on the second day of the Academy’s annual meeting at Harvard University. Congratulations, Cecily!
Several grad students joined Prof. Gertsman at the Medieval Academy of America’s centennial meeting at Harvard University. Cecily Hughes delivered an award-winning paper in the session on Scandinavian art (more on that separately!). Claudia Haines reports that she had the opportunity to hear several fascinating papers (on topics ranging from the integration of music into the social fabric of thirteenth-century Lille, to the diaphanous pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels, to the construction of identity in Scandinavian literature, to narratives of enslavement in Iberia, and beyond), visit many of Boston’s fabulous libraries and museums, reconnect with familiar colleagues and meet new ones—all in all, it was a hugely enriching experience! Rebekkah Hart, in her capacity as a member of the MAA Graduate Student Committee, co-organized and co-chaired a panel on working across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Sarah Frisbie had a wonderful time attending sessions on materiality, optics, and medieval epistemologies, cheering on Prof. Gertsman, Cecily, and Rebekkah, spending her lunch breaks in the Harvard Art Museums, and eating more than one cannoli. Anna Farber, for whom the MAA was her first conference, says that all the sessions, panels, and gallery visits she attended significantly improved her understanding of the diverse methodologies and subjects with which other medievalists are engaging in the field. Tess Artis, who presented her paper, “Prudent Giving: A Gold Girdle Book and the Rise of the Crokes Under Henry VIII,” at the RSA – held at the same time in the same city – nevertheless made her way to Cambridge to partake in several sessions. And Prof. Gertsman organized and chaired a session on “Form, Thought, and the Pleasure of Looking,” which featured Herbert Kessler, (Johns Hopkins), Megan McNamee (Edinburgh), Jeffrey Hamburger (Harvard), and Vincent Debiais (EHESS).