Read More

Reed O’Mara named the 2025-27 Kress Institutional Fellow in Munich

Congratulations to the Department of Art History and Art Ph.D. candidate and Mellon Fellow Reed O’Mara, who has been selected as the 2025-2027 Kress Institutional Fellow at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, Germany. As a Fellow, Reed will conduct research on her dissertation, “Materializing Sacred Language: Picturing and Performing Hebrew in Late Medieval Art.” This extremely competitive fellowship will offer Reed the opportunity to visit museums, libraries, archives, and sites throughout Germany and Austria pertinent to her dissertation, which is being advised by Professor Elina Gertsman. Reed is the second PhD student in the Department to receive this prestigious fellowship; Sam Truman, a PhD candidate in medieval art, is currently completing her 2023-2025 Kress Fellowship at The Courtauld Institute of Art and Warburg Institute in London, UK. 

Read more

Read More

Jillian Kruse awarded Chester Dale Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Congratulations to Jillian Kruse who was awarded the 2025-2026 Chester Dale Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she will be hosted by the Department of Drawings and Prints under the leadership of Dr. Nadine M. Orenstein, Drue Heinz Curator in Charge in the Department of Drawings and Prints. The highly competitive 12-month residential predoctoral fellowship will support her dissertation “Printing Utopia: Experimentation, Collaboration, and Anarchy in the Prints of Camille Pissarro.” The fellowship offers unparalleled access to the Met’s collection and resources as well as opportunities to actively participate in the museum’s larger scholarly community. Jillian will also assist with museum projects relevant to my research under the supervision of Dr. Ashley Dunn, Associate Curator of Drawings and Prints in charge of nineteenth-century French works on paper.

Read more

Read More

Faculty Work-in-Progress: Liquid Flesh and the Medicine of Immortality

12:00 pm | Clark Hall Room 206, 11130 Bellflower Road

Embodiment of paradoxes and prophecies, fragmented by metaphors, the heterogeneous, ever-shifting artifact that is the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, could hardly stand further from the natural world. Late antique and Byzantine authors described her womb was the bush that burns and is not consumed, her body as the throne and the altar of God, and her arms as the liturgical spoon. She is a virgin who lactates. Despite her extraordinary qualities, remote from the experiences of womankind, art historians who have attempted to interpret this last facet of a very complex subject – the nursing Virgin Mary – have commonly essentialized it by presenting modern western constructions of nursing and motherhood as ahistorical, self-evident truths that are realized in this image-type. While scholars in many fields have explored the implications of gender theory for well over two decades, little of this work has been directed at Byzantine, and none at Egyptian Christian, art history. The vast distance that separates women engaging in the biologically natural act of nursing from the social construction of a nursing female cult figure shrinks and even disappears in their writings. Elizabeth Bowman, Elsie B. Smith Professor in the Liberal Arts, was motivated by this historiographic pattern and uses this iconographic type as a vehicle for exploring the variability of assemblages of the Virgin Mary Galaktotrophousa, or ‘she who nourishes with milk,’ and her diverse audiences.

An informal lunch will be provided.

Registration is requested. Register HERE.

Read more

Read More

Byzantium and its Environment

Congratulations to Zoe and Luke on getting their papers accepted to the Oxford University Byzantine Society’s 27th Annual International Graduate Conference! Entitled “Byzantium and its environment,” it will take place on the 1st-2nd March, 2025, at the Faculty of History, George Street, OX1 2BE. The conference will also be available online;  please purchase a ticket via Eventbrite here. The full program and abstracts of papers can be found on the OBS website.

Read more

Read More

Grad medievalists present at the Newberry Library

This weekend, third-year doctoral student Rebekkah Hart and second-year MA student Sarah Frisbie traveled to Chicago to participate in the Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference in Pre-Modern Studies at the Newberry Library. Rebekkah served on the conference’s organizing committee and chaired a panel entitled “Oh, When the Saints…” Sarah presented a version of her MA Qualifying Paper, “’One God, One Light, One Cause’: Materialities of Stained Glass in an Auvergnois Trinity” at the panel “Visual Landscape of Faith.” Congratulations to Rebekkah and Sarah! Click below to see more photos.

Read more

Read More

January Art Talks

January brings us three Art Talks presented by the department’s graduate students! All will be held in the Ingalls Seminar Room.

On January 23, at 1 PM, join us for two medieval art papers! Sara Frisbie will present “One God, One Light, One Cause’: Materialities of Stained Glass in an Auvergnois The Trinity” in preparation for the Multidisciplinary Graduate Conference at the Newberry Library, immediately followed by Cecily Hughes’s grant-winning paper, “The Measure of a Saint: Size, Landscape, and Meaning in St. Olaf Pilgrim Badges,” which she will deliver at the College Art Association’s conference in February. Also at the CAA conference, Jillian Kruse will present “Collective Labors: Collaboration as Motif and Method in Pissarro’s Prints,” and her Art Talk is scheduled for January 27 at 11 AM. We hope you can attend all three!

Read more

Read More

Congratulations, everyone, on the fabulous prospectus-cum-QP session on Friday! Arielle Suskin, Clara Pinchbeck, and Claire Sumner presented their dissertation research, while MA students Sarah Frisbie, Sara Miller, Darren Helton, Megan Alves, and Sydney Collins took us on a dizzying visual tour  that ranged from contemporary cyborg theory to medieval theology of light, and from ancient Etruria to Byzantine Rus. Pictured here with Prof. Gertsman wielding the Chicken of Power and Timekeeping.

Read more

Read More

Creation and (Re)Birth Curatorial Talk

We were delighted to host the curatorial talk for the Creation and (Re)Birth Exhibition on November 14 to a full house! Co-curators Prof. Elina Gertsman and Dr. Gerhard Lutz talked about the concept of the exhibition and then focused on specific objects, with the all-important participation from Dr. Sonya Rhee Mace and three PhD students — Zoe Appleby, Rebekkah Hart, and Cecily Hughes. The repeat of the event, this time for the university audience, will take place on January 22.

Read more

Read More

Tracing Jewish Histories

Save the date for a two-day symposium titled Tracing Jewish Histories: The Afterlives of Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts, Judaica, and Architecture! Co-organized by Reed O’Mara and Laura Feigen, this symposium will take place in London at The Courtauld Institute of Art on May 19th and 20th. It will include scholars...

Read more

Read More

Congratulations to Alex Kaczenski on joining LACMA!

We are delighted to announce that Alex Kaczenski, a doctoral candidate in medieval art, just started her new position as the Assistant Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art! Alex joins LACMA from the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, where she has been a curatorial assistant. LACMA’s vast European painting collection comprises works ranging from the twelfth to the early twentieth century. In her role as Assistant Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, Alex will be responsible for collection research and development through exhibitions, publications, and acquisitions.

Read more

123›»