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.
Fourth-year PhD candidate in medieval art and Mellon Fellow Reed O’Mara will begin working as the curatorial intern in the Department of Manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum this fall. The Getty houses one of the leading medieval manuscript collections in the United States, and the graduate internship program offers participants hands-on experience with exhibition planning, objects research, and museum work. One of the manuscripts central to Reed’s dissertation on Jewish illuminated manuscripts, the Rothschild Pentateuch, is housed at the Getty. It is an extraordinary achievement, especially so because this same internship was held by our very own Sam Truman a year ago. Congratulations, Reed!
Throughout the Middle Ages, affluent women expressed their social and political power as well as their piety by commissioning luxurious art objects. Sam Truman, PhD student in medieval art, just published an article in the Getty’s News and Stories, where she explores images of these women in a broad variety of medieval manuscripts. Read it here!
Congratulations to our very own Dr. Justin Willson, who was just awarded the 2023 Emerging Scholar Prize by the Society for Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art & Architecture (SHERA) for his article “On the Aesthetic of Diagrams in Byzantine Art,” which was published in Speculum in July. The judges called the article “a tour de force, drawing on an impressive command of multiple languages, theological traditions, texts, and images.’”
