Elina Gertsman is Distinguished University Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Medieval Art at Case Western Reserve University, where she currently serves as an interim chair of the Art History and Art Department. She writes on a wide variety of subjects, from image theory to polyfunctionality of objects. Her books have tackled macabre murals, manipulable devotional sculpture, and unrepresentability in illuminated manuscripts. Anthologies have addressed questions of liminality, emotion, performance, abstraction, and animation. Recent articles have explored manuscript absences and erasures, materiality & semiotics of medium, figurations of despair, sensorium & imagination, and animality. Her work has been supported by the Guggenheim, Kress, Mellon, and Franco-American Cultural Exchange Foundations as well as by the ACLS.

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Passionate about teaching, she has won both of her university's highest awards for graduate teaching and mentoring, and received a teaching award from the Medieval Academy of America. Several years ago, she launched  a series of collaborative Mellon-sponsored courses on the global Middle Ages with curators at the Cleveland Museum of Art. 

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In 2022, she was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.