JUST PUBLISHED! Professor Benay’s chapter “Painting on Walls: Art History and Action in the Rustbelt,” appears in a groundbreaking new anthology dedicated to Public Humanities Scholarship
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Cosmic Ecologies: Animalities in Premodern Jewish Culture, an international symposium co-sponsored by Case Western Reserve University, the Newberry Library, and the Northwestern University, took place in Chicago last week. Monday sessions–“Beastly Hybrids,” “Animal Capacities,” and Mystic Fauna”–broached a broad variety of subjects, from animals in the Kabbalah to zoomorphic allegories to micrographic beasts to animal imagery in Hebrew and Yiddish manuscripts–with respondents providing contextual comparanda from medieval Christian and Islamic art. On Tuesday, audiences were treated to an extended session on bodies and animalities as well as to a manuscript / rare book study at the Newberry; the symposium concluded with a roundtable. The joint program was robustly represented by Reed O'Mara, who gave a fabulous talk on the Ambrosian Tanakh; Prof. Elina Gertsman, who co-organized the symposium and gave closing remarks; and Cecily Hughes, Rebekkah Hart, Zoe Appleby, Claudia Haines, Sarah Frisbie, and Ariella Har-Even who were in the audience. Prof. Gertsman was delighted by a surprise visit from Roshi Ahmadian, her very first MA student at CWRU, who now lives and works in Chicago!
Just published! Prof. Benay discusses her collaborative, Ohio Humanities Council-funded work on Pressing Matters in the most recent issue of CAN Journal.
The Department of Art History and Art is delighted to announce that Dr. Maggie Popkin, a specialist in ancient Roman art and architecture, was promoted to the rank of Professor effective July 1. Please join us in congratulating Dr. Popkin on this well-deserved promotion!
Congratulations to Professor Maggie Popkin, who has been awarded an Expanding Horizons Initiative Large Experimental Humanities Grant for her project “Embodied Religion and Extended Reality: The Impact of Emerging Technologies on the Humanistic Study of Sacred Space,” co-directed with Professor Tina Howe of the Religious Studies Department.
It has been a pleasure and a privilege to oversee the department during this academic year. I think it is fair to say that we have flourished.
Our graduate students have garnered a plethora of awards and fellowships, both external and internal, local and international. They have also presented at a startling range of important conferences, published peer-reviewed articles, curated exhibitions, and took part in archaeological excavations. Our faculty have received a great set of grants and awards as well, have published in some of the flagship journals of the field, have organized high-profile national and international symposia, had curated current and upcoming exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Sears think[box], and had books come out with flagship academic and art presses.
In the meantime, our graduating BAs and MAs are heading to some of the best graduate programs in the US and Europe. It was wonderful to celebrate them at the graduation! We look forward to welcoming our new graduate cohort in August and are excited have a new colleague, Professor Ben Murphy, join us in the fall.
Please click below to read more and see photos from the graduation, the departmental party, and the grad awards ceremony.
I hope you have a fabulous summer—see you in August!
Congratulations to Professor Gertsman for receiving the Jessica Melton Perry Award for Distinguished Teaching in Disciplinary & Professional Writing. This honor recognizes outstanding instruction in writing in professional fields and/or disciplines other than English. As one student described: “Prof. Gertsman teaches us how to critically approach the authors of our field and learn a spectrum of writing qualities in our vibrant class discussions. She lets us voice all the aspects we enjoyed as well as our critiques, and then she gently guides our views and suggests further insights. […] Her critical feedback on these assignments allows us to improve incrementally and map our own progress.” The award committee called Prof. Gertsman’s writing instruction a model for all faculty who work with graduate students as they endeavor to be scholarly writers.
Please join us in congratulating doctoral candidate Susana Montañés Lleras on the opening of her brilliant exhibition, Fairy Tales and Fables: Illustration and Storytelling in Art! On view through September 8 in the Prints and Drawings galleries of the Cleveland Museum of Art (Galleries 101A & 101B), Susana’s exhibition was developed as part of her third year doctoral internship under the supervision of Dr. Britany Salsbury, Curator of Prints and Drawings.
PhD candidates Sam Truman and Reed O’Mara both recently published pieces with their advisor, Professor Elina Gertsman. Sam contributed to a chapter, “The Sensory Aesthetics of Death,” for the edited volume A Cultural History of Death in the Middle Ages (Bloomsbury, 2024). Earlier this month, an article co-written by Reed and Professor Gertsman, “Wrathful Rites: Performing Shefokh ḥamatkha in the Hileq and Bileq Haggadah,” was published in a special issue of Religions, “Devotion, Practice, and Performative Expression in the Religious Art of Medieval Europe.” Congratulations to Sam and Reed on their publications! Click below to know more.
Congratulations to Prof. Andrea Rager who has been awarded a large Expanding Horizons Initiative Award for the interdisciplinary project “Ecology, Attention, Action.” Prof. Rager is serving as co-principal investigator on the project, with Prof. Fey Parrill (Chair, Dept. of Cognitive Science) as principal investigator, and Prof. Francesca Brittan (Dept. of Music) as co-principal investigator, along with co-investigators Dr. Nárcisz Fejes (Dept. of English),
Congratulations to MA candidate Rebekah Utian, who has just been named a 2024 Cleveland Foundation Public Service Fellow!
We are delighted to announce that MA candidate Emma Zavodny will be the 4th annual Keithley Fellow in Community-Engaged Art History!