History Professor Lands Grant for Images for Medieval Volumes

Susanna Throop, Assistant Professor of History, has been awarded a 2012 Bernadotte E. Schmitt Research Grant by the American Historical Association. Schmitt Grants support work in progress on the history of Europe, Africa and/or Asia. Throop will use the grant to purchase high-quality digital images of medieval manuscript illuminations from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This will enable her to finish an essay titled “Text, Image and Ideology: The Crucifixion and the First Crusade in a Late Medieval Manuscript (BnF fr. 352),” which will be published in two forthcoming volumes on the crusades and visual culture. The volumes are edited by Throop, Elizabeth Lapina (University of Durham), April Jehan Morris (University of Texas–Austin) and Laura Whatley (Kendall College of Art and Design). Further information on the Schmitt Grant
can be found at http://www.historians.org/prizes/SchmittGrantInfo.htm.

In May, Throop spoke at the 47th Annual International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University. Her paper, “Christian Community: Religious Practices, Monastic Reform and Lay Piety in the De expugnatione Lyxbonensi,” included work from an article that will be published next year and for which she was awarded the 2012 Denis Bethell Prize by the Charles Homer Haskins Society. In addition, Throop presided over a round-table pedagogical discussion titled “Medievalists and World History: What Matters and Why?” and served as a graduate student mentor via a program established by the Medieval Academy of America.