Reed O’Mara

Ph.D. candidate, Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) (dir. Professor Elina Gertsman) and 2025–27 Samuel H. Kress Institutional Fellow in the History of Art at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (ZI)
In my research, I focus on the art of medieval Ashkenaz, with a special interest in Hebrew illuminated manuscripts and incunabula. My dissertation examines word and image relationships in manuscripts and printed works in order to better understand the ever-changing perceptions of the Hebrew language in the late Middle Ages, ca. 1200–1500, by Jewish and Christian communities alike. From examples of visual-verbal wordplay to the material splendor of word panels in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Mahzorim all the way to the weaponization of Hebrew in fifteenth-century broadsides and anti-Jewish polemics, my work aims to contribute to our appreciation of how language and art operated in tandem in medieval visual culture.
This research meaningfully intersects with previous projects I have worked on. In a 2024 article co-authored with Elina Gertsman, in Religions, we considered how performance theory and the concept of emotional communities, pioneered by Barbara H. Rosenwein, intersect in the reception of Haggadot and in the miniatures accompanying Shefokh ḥamatkha in particular. The emotional valences of certain prayers and how images additionally invite or condition a viewer-reader to have an emotional response (frequently informed by his or her languages, communities, identities, etc.) is a line of inquiry that I find particularly useful and compelling in analyzing Hebrew illuminated manuscripts, objects which necessarily required—and continue to require—close and intimate handling.
In a piece for Convivium, I turned my attention to Sephardic manuscripts, specifically the fourteenth-century Golden Haggadah (London, British Library, Ms. Add. 27210). Like emotional communities, the history of the senses is a constructive angle from which to approach manuscripts such as the Golden Haggadah because it taps into aspects of reception theory that have rarely been applied to the study of these materials. In many ways, this approach allows one to examine a manuscript on its own terms and in the vocabularies relevant to its original viewer-readers.
The symposium Tracing Jewish Histories: The Long Lives of Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts, Judaica, and Architecture (CWRU / The Courtauld Institute of Art, May 2025), coordinated with Laura Feigen, represents my interests in the longer material histories of Judaica, manuscripts, and incunabula. Combining the methods of codicology, paleography, provenance research, museology, and traditional art history is essential for formulating the varying receptions of medieval works of art across time—not only in the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth centuries when they joined institutional and private collections, for example, but also as they were (re-)encountered and (re-)used in the periods immediately following their creation. It is difficult to find a medieval manuscript without additional notations, scribbles, doodles, embellishments, and the like, and so embracing these aspects becomes essential to devising a holistic view of a particular work.
With my work as a co-producer and co-host on the podcast The Multicultural Middle Ages, I aim to bring scholarship on the Middle Ages to a wider audience. I encourage those who are interested in collaborating on an episode to reach out to me, as I am always keen to see more art historical and Jewish studies scholarship on the podcast.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Franziska Kleybolte (March 31, 2026). Researcher of the Week. medievalJewishStudiesNow! Retrieved April 15, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15zhy