Please save the date for the 51st Annual Cleveland Symposium, to be held on Friday, November 14, 2025 at the Cleveland Museum of Art. This year’s theme is “Love and Desire.” Stay tuned for the call for papers!
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Join us for the Provost’s Forum for Breaking Boundaries, where Professor Elina Gertsman and Maggie Popkin will present their ground-breaking research into mixed-reality modeling and their collaborative work with institutions across campus! More information on the event here.
We are utterly delighted to announce that our very own alumna Dr. Nikki DeLuca just published her first book, Shades of Meaning: Shadows in Medieval Manuscript Illumination. Through the lens of fifteenth-century manuscript painting, the book investigates visual, metaphorical, and supernatural shadows in art to discover what they meant to the medieval viewer. Click here to go to the table of contents, acknowledgments, and other preliminary matter — and look out for copies at the KSL and the Ingalls!
Congratulations to Vivian Lewis, our very own graduate and now an MA student in library science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who presented a version of her BA capstone, “Stronger Than Lions: Meaning-Making in a Medieval Jewish Aquamanile,” at the 24th Annual Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies, co-hosted this year by UNC and Duke! This was a full-circle event for Vivian, who chaired a session as an undergraduate when CWRU hosted Vagantes just a few years ago. Vivian’s paper examined the Walters aquamanile, a rare 13th-century bronze lion-shaped vessel inscribed with a Hebrew prayer, to uncover a nuanced narrative of Jewish identity, resilience, and cultural adaptation in medieval Europe. One of the conference attendees, a fellow of the Medieval Academy, wrote to Prof. Gertsman about Vivian’s wonderful “presentation and contextualization of this amazing piece,” and added that “the depth of knowledge apparent in her answers to questions was truly impressive.” Well done, Vivian!
Don't miss the Edge of Tomorrow screening with introduction and discussion by Prof. Steve Ciampaglia on April 10 at 7 pm at the CIA Cinematheque! Buy tickets here.
Please join us for the annual Julius Fund Lecture in Byzantine Art presented this year by Pau Stephenson of Towson University! Entitled “Devastating Beauty: Some Reflections on Two Roman Things in the Cleveland Museum of Art,” the talk will take place at the Eldred Auditorium on CWRU's campus on...
Congratulations to Prof. Erin Benay and Prof. Elina Gertsman who were both nominated for the 2024-2025 Jackson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Mentoring! The Jackson Award celebrates faculty and staff who have guided a student in their academic and career paths; fostered the student's long-term personal development; challenged the...
Congratulations to Prof. Elina Gertsman and Prof. Maggie Popkin who were both nominated for the 2024-2025 John S. Diekhoff Award for Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring/Teaching! The award, created in 1978, recognizes exceptional contributions to graduate student education at CWRU through exemplary advising, teaching, and mentoring. Up to four winners...
Cecily Hughes, third-year PhD student in medieval art, was awarded the coveted Graduate Student Paper Prize by the Medieval Academy of America! Cecily presented her award-winning paper, “A Place to Shine: Darkness and Light in a Medieval Swedish Sacrament Niche,” in the New Perspectives on Medieval Scandinavia session held on the second day of the Academy’s annual meeting at Harvard University. Congratulations, Cecily!
Several grad students joined Prof. Gertsman at the Medieval Academy of America’s centennial meeting at Harvard University. Cecily Hughes delivered an award-winning paper in the session on Scandinavian art (more on that separately!). Claudia Haines reports that she had the opportunity to hear several fascinating papers (on topics ranging from the integration of music into the social fabric of thirteenth-century Lille, to the diaphanous pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels, to the construction of identity in Scandinavian literature, to narratives of enslavement in Iberia, and beyond), visit many of Boston’s fabulous libraries and museums, reconnect with familiar colleagues and meet new ones—all in all, it was a hugely enriching experience! Rebekkah Hart, in her capacity as a member of the MAA Graduate Student Committee, co-organized and co-chaired a panel on working across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Sarah Frisbie had a wonderful time attending sessions on materiality, optics, and medieval epistemologies, cheering on Prof. Gertsman, Cecily, and Rebekkah, spending her lunch breaks in the Harvard Art Museums, and eating more than one cannoli. Anna Farber, for whom the MAA was her first conference, says that all the sessions, panels, and gallery visits she attended significantly improved her understanding of the diverse methodologies and subjects with which other medievalists are engaging in the field. Tess Artis, who presented her paper, “Prudent Giving: A Gold Girdle Book and the Rise of the Crokes Under Henry VIII,” at the RSA – held at the same time in the same city – nevertheless made her way to Cambridge to partake in several sessions. And Prof. Gertsman organized and chaired a session on “Form, Thought, and the Pleasure of Looking,” which featured Herbert Kessler, (Johns Hopkins), Megan McNamee (Edinburgh), Jeffrey Hamburger (Harvard), and Vincent Debiais (EHESS).
We are tremendously proud to announce the Tracing Jewish Histories symposium, co-organized by Reed O’Mara, with sessions introduced and chaired by several of our graduate students! See the full program here.
Works of art and architecture made by or for Jewish communities in the medieval period are often examined through the lenses of persecution and expulsion, or are contrasted against Christian or Muslim “styles.” This symposium seeks to expand and nuance these narratives in order to highlight how works of art and architecture can uniquely trace the history of particular Jewish communities by mapping their movements and traditions across generations and geographies. Medieval Jewish objects and spaces can also serve as loci to examine ideas related to collective memory and cultural identity. To that end, the symposium seeks to open new dialogues regarding the “afterlives” of medieval Jewish art more broadly, initiating discussions regarding the ways in which works of art and architecture continued to bear witness to the richness of Jewish life and culture long after they were created.
Organised by Laura Feigen and Reed O’Mara, this symposium is supported by Sam Fogg and the Mellon Foundation with additional support from The Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University.