Peter H. Brieger Memorial Lecture: Paul Binski (University of Cambridge) and Elina Gertsman (Case Western Reserve University)

The Department of Art History is pleased to present the 2026 Peter H. Brieger Memorial Lecture, featuring Paul Binski (University of Cambridge) and Elina Gertsman (Case Western Reserve University).

“Stories and Histories: A Conversation on Mediaeval Art”

In a world of post-truth, what is the status of historical enquiry into the arts and cultures of the past? Paul Binski and Elina Gertsman propose a discussion of the roles of historical understanding and the way they illuminate both the past and the present in relation to mediaeval art and architecture. The discussion will open out into a debate about topics which not only engage them intellectually but also reflect their lived experience as academics with close links to now increasingly vulnerable areas of Europe. 

Profoundly influenced not only by the heritage of Russian Orthodox Christianity but also by the imaginative power of St Augustine’s thought, Paul Binski will set out how he came to be both moved by and interested in the domain of the aesthetic as a result of his childhood experiences of religion. The era of post-truth and, he will suggest, increasing subjectivism in the humanities, has challenged and arguably weakened our idea not of truth, but of fiction, of the artificiality of human artefacts.  He will range across questions of the senses, affects, the ethic domain of mediaeval art and the place of architecture.

Elina Gertsman, whose secular upbringing stood in contrast with the persistently visible artefacts of the mediaeval city of her childhood, has always seen her work guided by the lodestar of her cultural inheritance. Her scholarship ranges broadly across Jewish and Christian art of the late Middle Ages but is nevertheless anchored by the continual inquiry into experience and reception—the inquiry that finds itself at odds with claims for truth in images that is presently sweeping the field. When does something understood as deeply personal stop inflecting and begin dictating the study of the past?

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