Elizabeth S. Bolman
Elizabeth S. Bolman is Chair of the Department of Art History and Art, and Elsie B. Smith Chair in the Liberal Arts. She engages with the visual culture of the eastern Mediterranean in the late ancient and Byzantine periods. Professor Bolman is best known for her work in Egypt, in which she has demonstrated the vitality of Christian Egyptian art and a new understanding of the nature of artistic production there in the early Byzantine period. She edited and was the principal contributor to the award-winning Monastic Visions: Wall Paintings in the Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea (Yale University Press and the American Research Center in Egypt, 2002) and to The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt (Yale University Press and the American Research Center in Egypt, 2016). This recent book is the product of over a decade-long multidisciplinary project that she founded and directed, which included cleaning and conservation of the Red Monastery’s spectacular paintings. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright program, National Endowment for the Humanities, Dumbarton Oaks, American Research Center in Egypt, and United States Agency for International Development.
Recent Department News
Year-end message from Elina Gertsman, the Acting Chair of Art History and Art
It was a true privilege to shepherd the department during this academic year. Despite all the complexities, we have accomplished astonishing things! Both our faculty members and our graduate students garnered extremely competitive fellowships and awards, organized international conferences, spoke at a broad variety of venues, published widely, and curated exhibitions. Our studio artists, in turn, exhibited their work across the United States. Our lecture series brought extraordinary scholars to campus; the Graduate Association for Medieval Studies and the Undergraduate Art History Club held a series of fabulous events; and the Cleveland Symposium, which celebrated its 50th anniversary, was a rousing success.
PhD Candidate Arielle Suskin wins Baker-Nord Institute for the Humanities Flash Grant!
Congratulations to PhD candidate Arielle Suskin, who has been awarded a Flash Grant from the Baker-Nord Institute for the Humanities. The grant will support the upcoming exhibition that Arielle is curating related to the Kelvin Smith Library Special Collections Roman Coin Collection. Arielle is the Research Lead on the...
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.
Students publish in CAN Journal
Congratulations to Alli Boroff, a second-year MA student in medieval art and a Keithley Fellow, and Madalyn Fox, a second-year MA student in the Art History and Museum Studies program and a Barbato Fellow on their publications in CAN Journal! Alli’s piece is a review of Pintoricchio Magnified: An...
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.
The Hay archive of Coptic manuscripts consists of seven fragmentary sheets of leather bearing spells for divination, protection, healing, personal advancement, cursing and the satisfaction of sexual desire. Purchased from the heir of the famous early Egyptologist and draftsman, Robert Hay (1799–1863), the manuscripts arrived at the British Museum
in 1869. A new study prompted by the urgent conservation needs of the corpus has sought to provide a model integrated approach to the publication of ancient texts as archaeological objects.
Congratulations to PhD student Luke Hester and TWDC’s Programming and Marketing Manager Rebekah Utian (CWRU Art History MA ‘24) who co-organized a Pop-Up Museum, “Storied Threads: Natural Fibers from Past to Present,” hosted by the Tremont West Development Corporation as part of its Arts in August series. The Pop-Up...
Department’s faculty and graduate students take pride of place in art/sci magazine
Just two more weeks to see Prof. Elina Gertsman’s and Dr. Gerhard Lutz’s Creation, Birth, and Rebirth show, which was a central feature in this issue of art/sci magazine, and was reviewed in the print version of Plain Dealer and on cleveland.com. The feature highlights the collaboration between the program and the museum, as well as the role of graduate students in the making of the show and writing its didactics. The magazine, in its new online format, further links to the December interview with Prof. Maggie Popkin about the NEH Public Scholars award given in support of her new book on souvenirs, and announces international symposia convened by Prof. Elizabeth Bolman and Reed O’Mara.
Ghosts galore!
Congratulations to Sam Truman, PhD candidate in medieval art, who recently presented her paper “‘Straunge Sights’: The Representation and Reception of Samuel’s Ghost in the Early Modern Period” at the Ghosts in Britain and Ireland, 1500-1950 conference held at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, Ireland. The paper considered how the reception of an image of the Raising of Samuel found in a manuscript of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (British Library, Harley MS 1766) changed in the wake of the Protestant Reformation.
Sam is also co-organizing and co-chairing two panels at the 2025 International Medieval Congress, which will be held in Leeds, England July 7-10. These panels, “The Living Dead and the Transmission of Otherworldly Knowledge in Medieval Texts and Images I & II,” will feature a paper by recent department graduate Angie Verduci!
CFP: Metal as Medium
2026 International Congress on Medieval Studies
May 14 – 16, 2026 | Kalamazoo, MI
Organizers: Elina Gertsman (Case Western Reserve) and Nikki DeLuca (University of Vermont)
Cherubim of the Ark, Nicanor’s Gates, the Grail, the reliquary of Sainte Foy: metal objects, real and imaginary, imbued with magic or channeling the miraculous, haunt the long history of medieval art. This session seeks to inquire into material significance of metals, and we invite papers that explore a broad array of themes knotted around their physical and allegorical properties. Topics may include but are not limited to semiotics of metal artefacts; metaphysics of metals; metal’s material relationship with other substances, such as earth or stone; metal visualized in other media; metals and alchemy; metals and cosmology; metals and the supernatural; and metals in prophetic and eschatological discourses. Interdisciplinary approaches are welcome, but the heart of the session lies in its focus on the visual universe of metals manifested as objects: extant, described, or evoked.
Submit your abstract by September 15 here!