Abigail Balbale gave a talk entitled “Contesting the Caliphate: Ibn Mardanīsh’s fight with the Almohads in Twelfth-Century Iberia” on April 14 at the University of Pennsylvania. She presented a paper entitled “Ruptures and Continuities from the Umayyad to Abbasid Caliphate” at a conference on “The Global Eighth Century” at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World on April 15–16.

Aaron Glass has been named a 2016–17 Getty Scholar. Read more here. He has also received a grant from the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe to hold a Franz Boas Critical Edition project meeting at their campus during the 2016–17 academic year.

Ivan Gaskell presented a paper entitled “Art and Ethics: The Ethical Significance of the Capacities Engaged by Aesthetic Judgment” at the annual meeting of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association held in San Francisco March 30–April 3. On April 16, at the American Society for Aesthetics Eastern Division Meeting in Philadelphia, he participated in a panel on Art History and Museums.

Peter N. Miller published short pieces on antiquarianism and material culture in The Chronicle of Higher Education and on the intellectual history of academic administration in Perspectives of the American Historical Association. He also gave a paper on Peiresc and jewelry history at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Boston.

Stephanie Su has received the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellowship from the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in Norwich, England. She will continue her current research project on colors in Meiji Japanese prints and textiles with the Institute and the British Museum.

Ittai Weinryb’s book, The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages, has just been published by Cambridge University Press. His edited volume Ex Voto: Votive Giving Across Cultures, has just appeared as Cultural Histories of the Material World 6.

Catherine Whalen led the session “The Material Culture of Leadership: A Workshop with Objects, Images, and Texts” and co-moderated “When Stuff Matters: How Objects of Controversy Can Spark a Civic Engagement” at the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting on April 9.

Catherine Whalen, Ivan Gaskell, PhD student Yenna Chan, and 2nd-year master’s student Kaitlin McClure represented Bard Graduate Center at the meeting of the Northeastern Public Humanities Consortium at Brown University, April 22-23.