Congratulations to Meredith Cohen (UCLA, Art History) for receiving the 2017 Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award. This book award is given annually by the Society of Architectural Historians in recognition of the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of architecture published by a North American scholar. Professor Cohen’s book, The Sainte-Chapelle and the Construction of Sacral Monarchy: Royal Architecture in Thirteenth-Century Paris, brings together architectural, urban, and political history to explain how the Sainte-Chapelle shaped the physical form, social space, and political identity of Paris as a royal capital in the High Middle Ages.
Additionally, Professor Cohen is teaching this Fall’s CMRS Seminar. The course’s theme is “Materiality” and enrollment is open to UCLA graduate students. Given the ever increasing virtuality of experience and its concomitant relativities, scholars have turned in the past decade to examining the spectrum of materiality. This course will examine that concept in its broadest parameters, from the processes of making and exchange to thing theory and the limits of absence. The course will be based on our own analysis of theoretical models on the subject as well as different approaches to materiality scholars have taken in their own research.
Speakers will include:
October 23: Hussein Fancy (History, University of Michigan)
November 6: Thomas Nickson, (Art History, Courtauld Institute of Art, London)
“Light as Material in the Middle Ages”
November 21: Therese Martin (Art History, Instituto de Historia, CCHS, Madrid)
“The Materialization of Power by Ruling Women: Cross-Cultural Case Studies from Islamic and Christian Iberia, 960-1120″
December 4: Brigitte Bedos-Rezak (History, New York University)
“On the Materiality of Parchment and Wax”