Summer 2019 Academic Adventures for Doctoral Student Emily Tuttle
Second-year PhD student Emily Tuttle is spending the summer of 2019 abroad, leading students to Ireland, Wales, and England on her third study abroad trip with Limestone College in conjunction with EF Tours. These trips provide undergraduates short-term stays abroad to visit museums and historic sites. For many, it is their first experience traveling outside of the U.S. This year the tour highlights will include the Ring of Kerry, Trinity College in Dublin to see the Book of Kells, the castles of Wales, the home of William Shakespeare, Windsor Castle, Stonehenge, Bath, and a day for museums in London. In past years Emily has taken students to Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal, and she looks forward to leading students around the rich historical sites of Peru in 2021.
After the students depart for home, Emily will remain in England to conduct research for her dissertation on late medieval domestic interiors and material culture, which includes visits to the V&A Museum, the London Museum, the British Museum, and the National Archives in Kew. These visits will allow her to photograph surviving household objects, adding to the collection of wills and inventories that serve as valuable primary sources for her research. From London, she will depart for York, the major focus of her dissertation, to continue archival research she began last year at York University’s Borthwick Archives and at the York Minster Archives. She will also visit museums and historic homes in York to gather more material and further investigate medieval domestic life.
Emily will end her trip in July at the prestigious Leeds International Medieval Congress, where she will present her paper “Material Girls/ Material World: Women as Consumers of Foreign-Made Objects in Late Medieval York.” The paper is the result of preliminary dissertation research and focuses on the role of women in domestic culture, the shaping of medieval female identity, and women as players in the European commodity chain.
Emily is grateful for Department of Art History support for her research and conference travel, in the form of the Gerson Medieval Doctoral Research Grant and the Helen J. Beard Travel Conference Grant for her presentation at Leeds.
Rolled inventory from the York Minster Archives