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Professor Elina Gertsman Recognized with the Jessica Melton Perry Award

Congratulations to Professor Gertsman for receiving the Jessica Melton Perry Award for Distinguished Teaching in Disciplinary & Professional Writing. This honor recognizes outstanding instruction in writing in professional fields and/or disciplines other than English. As one student described: “Prof. Gertsman teaches us how to critically approach the authors of our field and learn a spectrum of writing qualities in our vibrant class discussions. She lets us voice all the aspects we enjoyed as well as our critiques, and then she gently guides our views and suggests further insights. […] Her critical feedback on these assignments allows us to improve incrementally and map our own progress.” The award committee called Prof. Gertsman’s writing instruction a model for all faculty who work with graduate students as they endeavor to be scholarly writers.

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Case Western Reserve University’s Art History Department and the Interactive Commons wowed at the Medieval Academy of America’s annual conference, held this year at the University of Notre Dame. Prof. Elina Gertsman and Reed O’Mara organized a session on the use of immersive technologies in teaching, and in addition staged a HoloLens demonstration with the help of the incomparable Peter Gao and Karen Rhoad from the Interactive Commons. The demonstration focused on Prof. Gertsman’s Gothic Chapel and Prof. Elizabeth S. Bolman’s Red Monastery apps, while the session itself also included a presentation by Sonya Rhie Mace, the curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which discussed the uses of HoloLens at her recent Revealing Krishna show. Several PhD students and an undergraduate student traveled from CWRU to take part in the conference. It was a riveting show of what may result from the collaborative interdisciplinary projects between university units and between institutions, and with how much excitement these projects are welcomed by the broader academic world.

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This weekend, Rebekkah Hart, second-year PhD student in medieval art, presented a talk entitled “The Lithic and the Liquid in the Virgin’s Womb” at the 2024 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference in Premodern Studies at the Newberry Library. Her talk focuses on Tilman Riemenschneider’s The Virgin of the Annunciation (c....

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Dr. Justin Willson Awarded 2023 SHERA Emerging Scholar Award–Congrats!

Congratulations to our very own Dr. Justin Willson, who was just awarded the 2023 Emerging Scholar Prize by the Society for Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art & Architecture (SHERA) for his article “On the Aesthetic of Diagrams in Byzantine Art,” which was published in Speculum in July. The judges called the article “a tour de force, drawing on an impressive command of multiple languages, theological traditions, texts, and images.’”

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Congratulations to Prof. Erin Benay on her Inaugural Lecture as Distinguished Scholar in the Public Humanities!

Congratulations to our own Distinguished Scholar in the Public Humanities, Prof. Erin Benay, on the astounding success of her inaugural public lecture, "From Campus to Community: Taking Art and its Histories to the Street!" Her talk was delivered to a packed, standing-room-only audience in the Tink on November 15 and...

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Professor Elina Gertsman Awarded Distinguished University Professor at Convocation

Congratulations to our very own Professor Elina Gertsman for her appointment as Distinguished University Professor, the highest distinction granted to faculty at CWRU. Professor Gertsman is not only the youngest faculty member at CWRU to ever be awarded this title—she is also the first professor from our department and the second woman in all of the humanities. Read more and see more photos by clicking below!

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Elina Gertsman Delivers a Plenary at the International Medieval Congress

On July 4, 2023, Prof. Elina Gertsman delivered the annual Medieval Academy of America lecture at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, UK. Titled “Somatic Entanglements,” the plenary explored the ways that zoocephalic images in Hebrew manuscripts stage a wide variety of complex visual arguments about likeness and difference, and about humanity and animality. This lecture serves as the Academy’s showcase for the important work being done by scholars in North America. One part of Prof. Gertsman’s lecture formed the basis for her forthcoming article in Art History, the flagship journal of the Association for Art History.

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The Absent Image wins the 2023 Otto Gründler Prize for an Outstanding Monograph in Medieval Studies

Congratulations to Dr. Elina Gertsman, professor of medieval art and Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan Professor in Catholic Studies II, on winning the 2023 Otto Gründler prize for The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books. Given annually, the Otto Gründler Book Prize recognizes a monograph on a medieval subject that the selection committee determines has made an outstanding contribution to the field. Authors from any country are eligible, and nominations are accepted from readers and publishers. This is not the first honor for The Absent Image, which received the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from College Art Association in 2022.

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