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!
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.
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).
We are tremendously proud to announce the Tracing Jewish Histories symposium, co-organized by Reed O’Mara, with sessions introduced and chaired by several of our graduate students! See the full program here.
Works of art and architecture made by or for Jewish communities in the medieval period are often examined through the lenses of persecution and expulsion, or are contrasted against Christian or Muslim “styles.” This symposium seeks to expand and nuance these narratives in order to highlight how works of art and architecture can uniquely trace the history of particular Jewish communities by mapping their movements and traditions across generations and geographies. Medieval Jewish objects and spaces can also serve as loci to examine ideas related to collective memory and cultural identity. To that end, the symposium seeks to open new dialogues regarding the “afterlives” of medieval Jewish art more broadly, initiating discussions regarding the ways in which works of art and architecture continued to bear witness to the richness of Jewish life and culture long after they were created.
Organised by Laura Feigen and Reed O’Mara, this symposium is supported by Sam Fogg and the Mellon Foundation with additional support from The Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University.
Congratulations to Cecily Hughes, third-year PhD student in medieval art, on receiving the Einar and Eva Lund Haugen Memorial Scholarship! Administered by The Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study (SASS). The Haugen scholarship provides generous support for doctoral research in and about the Nordic regions. Cecily will use the award funding to travel to Norway and Sweden this summer and do research for her dissertation.
Come on, come all! Grad medievalists look forward to seeing you at the book club on Thursday!
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.
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.