College of Arts and Sciences

Please join us at 4:30 on Thursday, February 16, at the Baker-Nord Center (Clark Hall Room 206, 11130 Bellflower Road), for the Graduate Work-in-Progress talk by Reed O’Mara, “Idol Viewing and Idle Viewing: Exploring Erasures in the Munich Rashi.” Reed will discuss one of the earliest extant illuminated Hebrew manuscripts from Europe, the so-called Munich Rashi, copied in Germany in the 1230s for a wealthy Jewish patron. The commentary has an incomplete image cycle and several of its surviving paintings have been partially erased. In her lecture, Reed will consider the manuscript’s images in dialogue, addressing the way that the erasures wrought upon these images may have affected medieval viewers, and their perception of both the divine and images of the divine.

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This January, Cecily Hughes, first-year PhD student in medieval art, was able to experience Brought to Life: Painted Wood Sculpture from Europe, 1300–1700 (at SCMA from September 16, 2022–August 6, 2023). She spent the summer of 2021 contributing to the exhibition as a curatorial intern to Danielle Carrabino. The...

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Third-year PhD student in medieval art Reed O'Mara has just been named one of the 2023 recipients of the Rare Book School's William T. Buice III Scholarship. The scholarship was created in honor of Bill Buice, a former member of the Rare Book School Board of Directors (Chairman 2008-2014)....

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Congratulations to PhD students Reed O'Mara and Sam Truman for their splendid participation in the Medieval Academy of America's annual meeting! Sam spoke in the session, co-organized by Reed, on alternative publication venues for graduate students.

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Huge congratulations to our fourth-year PhD student Sam Truman, who has been awarded the coveted Byzantine Studies Conference Graduate Student Paper prize for her paper, “‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’: The Execution of Judas Iscariot in Two Byzantine Marginal Psalters"! Macte hac gloria!

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Congratulations to Reed who has been selected to participate in the 2022 Multidisciplinary Graduate Conference in Premodern Studies at the Newberry Library! Reed will present her paper, "The Language(s) of the Other: Pseudo-Hebrew & Yiddish in Fifteenth-Century German Broadsides," in the Redefining Community: Selfhood and Identity session. The hybrid...

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The first meeting of the newly minted Association of Medieval Graduate Students (AMGS) will be held on Friday, October 8th from 5-6pm at the Freedman Center on the first floor of Kelvin Smith Library. At the meeting, we will talk about filling out leadership positions, the goals of the...

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Throughout the Middle Ages, the pious Christian was constantly preoccupied with both the death of the earthly body and the subsequent survival of the soul. The fear of dying suddenly without repenting and confessing engendered images of death and the afterlife. Speakers in this session are encouraged to investigate late medieval representations of death as both an earthly and otherworldly matter. We welcome papers that explore the flourishing of these imageries especially in rural and marginal areas, which were extremely receptive to cultural exchanges, but which have not received proper scholarly investigation yet.

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Congratulations to Angie Verduci and Russell Green whose papers have been accepted to the Medieval Association of the Midwest’s Conference! The conference, Beneficence in the Medieval World, will be held on Zoom October 29-30, 2021. Angie's paper, entitled "Merciful Mary, Merciless Death: Late Medieval Depictions of Madonna della Misericordia...

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Congratulations to Alex Kaczenski and Sam Truman on passing their doctoral exams with flying colors! Alex and Sam were joined by the alumna Mia Hafer and the honorary medievalist Delilah for a little celebration in Prof. Gertsman's back yard.  

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