This academic year, the Department will be particularly well represented at the International Congress! Take a look at the program to see Reed O’Mara’s session on Jewish Women in the Middle Ages; Cecily Hughes’s and Rebekkah Hart’s session on Scales of Devotion and Embodied Religious Experience, inspired by the directed study they completed last year; Sarah Frisbie’s session on medieval graffiti; and Prof. Gertsman’s session on medieval materialities, fueled by the graduate seminar on the same topic that she recently taught. And, of course, the Interactive Commons will bring our fabulous medieval spaces apps to the Congress as well, the Red Monastery and Immersive Realms. View calls for papers and submit your abstract here!
The new issue of Perspective, published by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Paris), features a debate on the subject, conducted by Claudine Cohen, Brigitte Derlon, Elina Gertsman, Monique Jeudy-Ballini, and Itay Sapir, and led by Thomas Golsenne. Scholars of prehistoric, medieval, early modern, and contemporary art discuss several questions: should we consider art’s autonomy if not illusory, then at least relatively so? When have we started understanding and referring to images and objects as works of art? What are the critiques of this nomination? What are the advantages and disadvantages of speaking about “art” or “a work of art” in different fields of art history? Is art-making always political? What about art criticism?
Read the debate here.
Both as a physical dimension and a subjective concept, time defines human existence and experience, evident in visual production across eras and places. Held in partnership with the Cleveland Museum of Art as part of the joint program between CWRU and CMA, this year’s symposium welcomes innovative research papers that explore the themes of time and temporality in the creation, reception, and afterlives of objects and events in the visual arts. Submissions may explore aspects of this theme as manifested in any medium as well as in any historical period and geographic location.
How are objects, scents and memory connected? Find out from Prof. Elina Gertsman’s just-published “Housing Scent, Containing Sensorium,” now available online here! In this special issue of Medieval History Journal, dedicated to materiality in the medieval and early modern eras, Prof. Gertsman writes about extraordinary spice containers used in Jewish home liturgy, teasing out their multisensory potential and exploring the many ways these object elicited cognitive, affective, and physiological engagement with their users. Stay tuned for the next year’s publication of Prof. Gertsman’s guest-edited issue of Convivium dedicated to intertwinement between image and scent in the global Middle Ages, which will feature essays by our very own Sonya Rhie Mace and Reed O’Mara.
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!
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.
The International Center for Medieval Art News just published a wonderful feature penned by Reed O’Mara and Ariella Har-Even on their FUSE collaboration — with a great shoutout to the department, our medieval studies program, GAMS, and our marvelous colleagues at the CMA. Many of us benefited from the fantastic enameling workshop Ariella and Reed masterminded, and we look forward to more!