Ruth’s paper, “Analyzing the Torah Shield: Understanding the Abundance of Animal Imagery through the Zohar,” aims to explain the unusual presence of abundant animal imagery on a Boston MFA Torah shield through the relevance of the Zohar. Vivian’s paper, “Royal Family Feud: Cordelia Parting from her Sisters as a Pre-Raphaelite Social Commentary,” delves into Ford Madox Brown’s 1854 painting Cordelia Parting from her Sisters, now housed at the Cleveland Museum of Art. 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.
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.