Abigale Balbale has received the Medieval Academy of America’s Olivia Remie Constable Award. Read more. On March 16, she gave a lecture at Bard High School Early College on “The Caliphate and the Transformation of Culture from the Near East to Europe.”

Jeffrey Collins contributed to the anthology Benedict XIV and the Enlightenment: Art, Science, and Spirituality, published last month by University of Toronto Press. Collins’s chapter, entitled “Pedagogy in Plaster: Ercole Lelli and Benedict XIV’s Gipsoteca at Bologna’s Instituto delle Scienze e delle Art,” used period drawings, correspondence, and inventories to reconstruct the collection and display of plaster casts of ancient and modern sculptures at one of eighteenth-century Italy’s most progressive educational establishments. On March 4-5, Collins participated in the workshop “Digitizing the Grand Tour: A Workshop on the Worlds and Lives of Eighteenth-Century Travelers to Italy,” held at Stanford as part of its interdisciplinary Grand Tour Project. Collins’s contribution, entitled “Counting the Woodcocks: Snapshots from the Tour,” used the Grand Tour Explorer, a newly constructed database of British travelers, to test eyewitness accounts of travelers’ numbers and to chart their ebb and flow across time and space.

In January, Ivan Gaskell participated in the invitational workshop “Laying Up Treasures: The Deep History of Storage, Keeping, and Collecting” at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. In February, he attended the meetings of the Museum Committee of the College Art Association at the CAA annual conference in Washington, DC. In March, he participated in the Old Master Paintings Vetting Committee at the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht, The Netherlands. At Cambridge University in England, he presented the closing lecture entitled “Everything or Nothing? What do University Museums Know?” at the symposium, “The Museum as Method: Collections, Research, Universities at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities” (CRASSH).

Shawn C. Rowlands contributed an essay entitled “Interlocked: Aboriginal Australian Exchange Patterns and Incised Pearl Shells at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology” to Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, edited by Stephen Gilchrist (Harvard Art Museums: Cambridge, MA, 2016).