The Medieval Academy of America has announced the 2023 prize recipients, including Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize winner A&A alumnus John Lansdowne *19 and Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize co-recipients Julia Gearhart (A&A’s Director of Visual Resources) and Alice Isabella Sullivan (Assistant Professor Medieval Art and Architecture and Director of Graduate Studies, Tufts University).

Lansdowne earned the Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize with his article “Compounding Greekness: St. Katherine ‘Egyptian’ and the Sta. Croce Micromosaic,” Gesta 60 (2021).  Established by the Medieval Academy of America in 1971, the Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize is awarded annually for a first article in the field of medieval studies, published in a scholarly journal, and judged by the selection committee to be of outstanding quality.  Van Courtlandt Elliott was Executive Secretary of the Academy and editor of Speculum from 1965 to 1970. The prize that bears his name consists of a certificate and an award of $500. 

Sullivan and Gearhart co-directed the Sinai Digital Archive which won the Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize.  A collaboration with Saint Catherine Monastery at Mount Sinai and colleagues at the University of Michigan's Department of the History of Art, this project exemplifies inter-institutional sharing of archives to form a single, public, scholarly resource that makes the essential collections of Saint Catherine Monastery at Mount Sinai available to all. The Sinai Digital Archive encourages study, research, and teaching of the impressive Sinai collections of icons, manuscripts, and liturgical objects, as well as the architecture and monumental decoration of the monastery, gathered during the Michigan-Princeton-Alexandria Expeditions to Sinai in the 1950s and 1960s. The $1000 cash prize rewards digital projects in Medieval Studies whose quality of research and contributions to Medieval Studies are exceptional, taking into account the project’s goals and methodologies, design, presentation, accessibility, sustainability, and metadata compatibility.