Case Western Reserve University’s Art History Department and the Interactive Commons wowed at the Medieval Academy of America’s annual conference, held this year at the University of Notre Dame. Prof. Elina Gertsman and Reed O’Mara organized a session on the use of immersive technologies in teaching, and in addition staged a HoloLens demonstration with the help of the incomparable Peter Gao and Karen Rhoad from the Interactive Commons. The demonstration focused on Prof. Gertsman’s Gothic Chapel and Prof. Elizabeth S. Bolman’s Red Monastery apps, while the session itself also included a presentation by Sonya Rhie Mace, the curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which discussed the uses of HoloLens at her recent Revealing Krishna show. Several PhD students and an undergraduate student traveled from CWRU to take part in the conference. It was a riveting show of what may result from the collaborative interdisciplinary projects between university units and between institutions, and with how much excitement these projects are welcomed by the broader academic world.
GAMS will be gathering at BottleHouse Brewery on Wednesday, March 20 at 6:00 PM to discuss Umberto Eco’s acclaimed novel: The Name of the Rose. Please come prepared to discuss the book!
Congratulations to undergraduate seniors, Maddy Fox and Vivian Lewis, whose papers have been accepted for the 2024 SUNY New Paltz Art History Symposium from a highly competitive pool. Maddy’s paper, “The Adoption of Aesthetics: Borrowing Byzantium and Looking West in the Russian Romanesque,” seeks to address and expand the notion of amalgamation between the Byzantine and European tradition in Slavic architecture during the 12th century. Vivian’s paper focuses on Madox Brown’s Cordelia Parting from her Sisters and discusses Pre-Raphaelite social commentary about Victorian values; in 2023 it won an award for the best undergraduate art history paper. The conference sessions will be held in April via Zoom.