GRADUATE STUDENT ESSAY AWARDS
due SUNDAY 7 April 2024, 11:59 PM ET
The International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) wishes to announce its annual Graduate Student Essay Award for the best essay by a student member of the ICMA. The theme or subject of the essay may be any aspect of medieval art, and can be drawn from current research. Eligible essays must be produced while a student is in coursework. The work must be original and should not have been published elsewhere. We are pleased to offer First Prize ($400), Second Prize ($200), and Third Prize ($100).
We are grateful to an anonymous donor for underwriting the Student Essay Award competition. This member particularly encourages submissions that consider themes of intercultural contact — for instance, between Latin Christendom and the Byzantine realm; among Jews, Muslims, and Christians; or the dynamics of encounters connecting Europe, Africa, and Asia. These are not requirements, however, and the awards will be granted based on quality of the papers, regardless of topic.
The deadline for submission is SUNDAY 7 APRIL 2024, 11:59pm ET. The winners will be announced at the Spring Board Meeting in May. Recipients will be asked to forward their winning essay to the donor that underwrites the Student Essay Award competition.
Applicants must submit:
An article-length paper (maximum 30 pages, double-spaced, not including footnotes) following the editorial guidelines of our journal Gesta. A title page with essay title, author name, contact information, and affiliation must be included.
Each submission must also include a 250-word abstract written in English regardless of the language of the rest of the paper.
A curriculum vitae.
NOTE ON FILE SUBMISSION: Please submit PDF files when appropriate with the file named as LAST NAME first, then the item. Example: SMITHabstract.pdf, SMITHessay.pdf, SMITHcv.pdf
All applicants must be ICMA members.
All submissions are to be uploaded HERE.
Email questions to Ryan Frisinger at awards@medievalart.org. The winning essay will be chosen by members of the ICMA Grants and Awards Committee, which is chaired by our Vice-President.
RECENT RECIPIENTS
2023
First Prize: Emma Leidy (Columbia University), “Visualizing the Passion: Topographic Reality as a Mode of Late Medieval Devotion in The Epitaph of Adelheid Tucher (1483).”
Second Prize: Miguel Fernandes (The University of Chicago/Department of History), “Sensing Sacredness and Self: reliquaries of Portuguese saintly queens (13th c.).”
Third Prize: Ariela Algaze (Institute of Fine Arts; Johns Hopkins University, fall 2023), “Sculpture, Stagecraft, and Spectacle: Acting Crucifixes and Passion Dramas in Central Italy, 1250-1450.”
2022
First Prize: Allison Grenda (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor), “A Byzantine Gnadenstuhl: The Reception of a Western Iconography in Rural Venetian Crete” Second Prize: Sarah Cohen (Columbia University), “The Guelph Treasure Reliquary Monstrance with a Tooth of St. John the Baptist: Towards a Value-Driven System of Reuse in Medieval Germany”
Third Prize: Atineh Movsesian (Tufts University), “The Forgotten Women of the Monastery of Gandzasar: A Reexamination of the Sculptural and Epigraphic Program”
2021
First Prize: Masha Goldin (University of Tel Aviv), “Proving Matters of Faith: The Sacrament House at the Church of Our Lady in Bamberg as an Aesthetics of Facts”
Second Prize: Anna Carroll (Graduate Center, CUNY), “Templon to Iconostasis: Mediating Performance and Perception in the Byzantine Church Space”
Third Prize: Margaret Wilson (The Ohio State University), “The Relief of Exile: John the Evangelist’s Orientation Affirmed in Thirteenth-Century English Apocalypse Manuscripts”
2020
First prize: Whitney Kite (Columbia University), “The Madonna’s Magic Carpet: The Construction of Presence in an Armenian Tympanum Relief”
Second prize: Ryan Eisenman (University of Pennsylvania), “The Bishops and the Lions”
2019
First prize: Nancy Thebaut (University of Chicago), “Meaningful Folds: Representing and Qualifying Christ’s Absence through his Grave Clothes, ca. 1000”
Second prize: Justin Willson (Princeton University), “On the Aesthetic of Diagrams in Byzantine Art”
2018
First prize: Krisztina Ilko (University of Cambridge), “Forging the Augustinian Past: The Peculiar Image of St. Augustine giving his Rule to the Augustinian Friars in a late duecento Gradual”
Second prize: Netta Clavner (Birkbeck University), “Arma Angliae: The Heraldic Glass in the Great East Window of Gloucester Cathedral”
2017
First prize: Nicole Pulichene (Harvard University), “One whose Name was Writ in Wax: Reflections on the Medieval Reuse of the Boethius Diptych”
Second prize: Lauren Maceross (Johns Hopkins University), “‘My eye glances at nothing unless it gives my heart delight’: Physiological Poetics in a Late Medieval Coffret at the Metropolitan Museum”