Evan A. Gatti, associate professor of art history and associate director of the Elon Core Curriculum, presented "Drawn in Ink With Love: Desire in Looking at and Looking Back” and "Re-Presentation and a Theology of Images" at the International Medieval Studies Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Evan A. Gatti, associate professor of art history and associate director of the Elon Core Curriculum, presented "Drawn in Ink With Love: Desire in Looking at and Looking Back” and "Re-Presentation and a Theology of Images" at the International Medieval Studies Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She also organized three sessions sponsored by Episcopus: The Society for the Study of Bishops and the Secular Clergy in the Middle Ages and presided over their business meeting.
"Drawn in Ink with Love," offered a historiographic analysis of a phrase, "disegnate ad inchiostro, con amore," that was included in an early 20th-century essay on the Rotolo pergamenaceo con episodi degli Atti degli Apostoli (Parchment scroll with scenes from the Acts of the Apostles) held in the Museo del Tesoro del Duomo in Vercelli.
Gatti argues that the phrase, when understood as part of the broader scholarly production of Italian medievalist Carlo Cipolla, requires we see the Rotolo di Vercelli as part of an effort to define an Italian artistic style separate from outside influence or exchange. Gatti's paper also remarked on the urgency for contemporary scholars to call out and challenge arguments wherein medieval art can be being used to bolster the false narratives of a hegemonic medieval Christian Europe as support for white nationalism.
"Re-Presentation and a Theology of Images" was presented as part of a session of Brevia, or short three-minute papers on work in progress. The panel was modeled on similar successful sessions at the American Historical Association and aims to foster research in its very early stages and to generate paper proposals for the International Congress in 2020.
In addition to giving two papers, as president of Episcopus: The Society for the Study of Bishops and the Secular Clergy in the Middle Ages, Gatti organized three sessions for the Congress, including the Brevia, which was moderated by Kalani Craig, co-director, Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities and Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of History at Indiana University—Bloomington, and a session on "Clerics and Codices: Bishops, Secular Clergy and Their Books," moderated by Jennifer M. Feltman, assistant professor of art history at the University of Alabama.
Gatti served as the chair and moderator for "Old Clerics, New Tricks: Bishops, Secular Clergy, & New Methodology", which celebrated new approaches to historical bishops, including a database on Presbyters in the Late Antique West, presented by Jerzy Szafranowski (University of Warsaw), an reframing of hagiogra[hic categorise for monastic exegesis, presented by David Defries (Kansas State University), the application of network analysis as a mode of better understanding episcopal serial biography, presented by Kalani Craig (Indiana University- Bloomington), and finally, a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis of place in the rolls and registers of Oliver Sutton, Bishop of Lincoln, presented by Michael Burger (Auburn Univ.–Montgomery).
Gatti also presided over the annual business meeting for Episcopus: The Society for the Study of Bishops and the Secular Clergy in the Middle Ages.