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Scandinavian Pilgrimages

Congratulations to Cecily Hughes, fourth-year PhD candidate in medieval art, who traversed Scandinavia over the past few months to present at two international conferences and conduct dissertation research. In Reykjavik, Iceland, Cecily attended the 31st Congress of Nordic Historians where she delivered her paper “A Place to Shine: Darkness and Light in a Medieval Swedish Sacrament Niche.” Crossing the Baltic Sea to Helsinki, Finland, Cecily discussed “The Measure of a Saint: Size, Movement, and Meaning in St. Olaf Pilgrim Badges,” at the 14th triennial NORDIK Conference of Art History in the Nordic Countries. On the Swedish island of Gotland, Cecily visited twenty-two medieval churches, documenting their vivid wall paintings, art objects, and architecture.

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Art History Courses Spring 2026

HENRY ADAMS -ARTH/PHYS 150 An Introduction to the Universe and to the Meaning of Everything MW 12:45pm-2pm -ARTH 272 American Modernism in an International perspective (inactive n/a to schedule CAF submitted) MW 4:50pm-6:05pm   ERIN BENAY -ARTH 396 Majors Seminar TTH 11:30am-12:45pm -ARTH/HSTY 375/475 Doors Wide Shut:  The Private Art Collection from Raphael to Rauschenberg (inactive n/a...

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African “Peripheries:” Challenging the Paradigms of Archaeology and Art

Please join us for an extraordinary opportunity to learn about virtually unknown medieval Christian art and architecture in modern Sudan. Dr. Obłuski will be talking about a range of issues, including the excavation of a small building with wall paintings that Archaeology Magazine named among the top ten discoveries in the world in 2023. This lecture...

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Please join us on November 19 for what promises to be a fantastic lecture to be delivered by Margaret Graves, Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Brown. Titled “Islamic Ceramics and Other Fictions of Capital,” the lecture explores the fictionalized objects of Islamic ceramics collecting that suture together multiple temporalities with skill and ingenuity, creating new objects of delight for elite collectors and asking us to think again about what we value most in the artifacts of the medieval past. The lecture will be of interest to academics, museum professionals, and collectors, so please spread the word!

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Rethinking the Middle Ages: CWRU art historian reframes abstraction

The groundbreaking work of Prof. Elina Gertsman, Distinguished University Professor and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, and her colleague and co-author, Vincent Debiais, Research Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, was featured in The Daily. Read here about their collaboration and about the integral role their graduate students played in this international multidisciplinary project!

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Medieval PiIgrimage for Gamers

Reed O’Mara, PhD candidate in medieval art and Mellon Foundation Fellow, recently completed a year-long curatorial internship at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, CA. While there, Reed helped to produce and write an in-gallery video game, The Pilgrimage Road. The game takes players through the Camino de Santiago, a popular medieval pilgrimage to see the relics of St. James, and was part of the exhibition Going Places: Travel in the Middle Ages. You can read more about the game and Reed’s work here.

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Please join us in congratulating Professor Elina Gertsman, Distinguished University Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, on the publication of L’hypothèse abstraite – Écart, excès d’image au Moyen Âge, co-authored with Dr. Vincent Debiais (EHESS)! The book is the culmination of their collaborative project on abstraction in medieval art, which had its genesis in the French-American Cultural Exchange Foundation grant, and resulted in a series of publications, workshops, and symposia held on both sides of the Atlantic.  L’hypothèse abstraite explores abstraction as a mode of representation in medieval images that seek to figure unrepresentable truths. Its focus is on the intellectual process of abstraction as the means of accessing knowledge that lies beyond the senses and trips up operations of cognition and perception. The book does not posit medieval abstraction as a reaction to figuration; on the contrary, abstraction is seen as the driving force of figuration, which emphasizes the effects of representation and establishes the image as an image. It is the testimony to a visual process that frees itself from mimesis in favor of a poetics of the gap, engaging with the world that is complex and subtle — the process that undermines the fragile equivalences between what we see and what we know. The preface to the book was authored by Herbert L. Kessler. Read excerpts here.

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