Read More

Congratulations to Jillian Kruse and Reed O’Mara on Defending their Prospectuses!

Congratulations to Jillian Kruse and Reed O’Mara on successfully defending their dissertation prospectuses! Jillian’s dissertation, “Printing Utopia: Experimentation, Collaboration, and Anarchy in the Prints of Camille Pissarro,” will explore the intersections of Pissarro’s experimental and collaborative printmaking practice with his anarchist subject matter and philosophy. Through her research, Jillian plans to demonstrate that the artist’s prints served as sites in which he combined process, technique, and motif to create his own anarchist utopia founded in artistic freedom, collaboration, and a love of the earth. Reed’s dissertation, “Materializing Sacred Language: Picturing and Performing Hebrew in Late Medieval Art,” will consider text and image relationships in Jewish illuminated manuscripts and Christian prints from Ashkenaz and Italy, ca. 1200-1500. In particular, Reed will examine how word play, visual punning, pseudo-texts, and other visual-verbal mechanics contributed to the complicated status of Hebrew in the Middle Ages both within and beyond Jewish communities.

Read more

Mellon Seminar Featured in the College Bulletin

This year’s Mellon Collections Seminar, taught by Prof. Elina Gertsman (CWRU) and Dr. Gerhard Lutz (CMA), has been featured in the Case Western Reserve University College Bulletin! The profile highlighted the visit to the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), where students toured the museum’s medieval art galleries and were treated to a visit from the DIA’s curator of medieval arts, Chassica Kirchhoff. The course is keyed to the installation Elina and Gerhard are co-curating, scheduled to open at the CMA in Aug. 2024. Students are producing a robust gallery guide and a series of labels for the show, which will comprise a broad range of objects from the global Middle Ages. Click below for more info and photos!

Read more

Read More

New GAMS Events for November

We hope you all are having a wonderful second half of the semester! GAMS is ending the year with several exciting events. Follow CWRU Graduate Association of Medieval Studies for more, and check the GAMS newsletter for RSVP information. Alternately, please email cwru.medievalgrad@gmail.com to be added to the email...

Read more

Successful GAMS Book Club Outing

Our medievalists had so much fun at the Graduate Association of Medieval Studies book club event this October! We read Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon, a swashbuckling story of two unlikely friends set in about 1000 CE. Thanks to all who came to take part in our lively discussion!

Read more

Read More

Congrats to PhD Candidate Alex Kaczenski on New Exhibition!

Congratulations to PhD candidate in medieval art Alexandra Kaczenski on Word as Image, the exhibition she has curated for the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California! The show is on view through February 5, 2024. Word as Image, presented in the Museum’s focus gallery, highlights artworks from the Norton Simon collections that center on or subvert the idea that a text’s legibility is essential for making meaning. Spanning the comical to the political to the conceptual, Word as Image calls our attention to how we are constantly “reading the image” in and out of museum spaces. As such, artists challenge us to consider language and image anew, by positioning words as an essential part of visual culture.

Read more

Read More

Art Appreciation Workshop with Master’s Student Sarah Frisbie

If you’ve spent any time in a professional small-talk setting, you know how often art comes up and how hard it can be to fumble for a response in front of your future boss. This workshop, Art Appreciation for New Professionals, taught by first-year Master’s student Sarah Frisbie, is designed for people who have no idea what is happening when they walk into a museum—and people who avoid museums altogether.

Read more