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.
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