Doctoral Candidate Britt Boler Hunter’s Research Wins Presentation Awards and Research Grant

Doctoral candidate Britt Boler Hunter was awarded a Student Travel Grant from the International Center of Medieval Art, which will support hands-on research for her dissertation, “The Wellcome Apocalypse: An Intersection of Tradition and Innovation in a Late Fifteenth-century German Multi-Text Manuscript.” She was one of only three students selected from applicants all over the world. The committee noted that Britt’s project “struck this year’s committee as particularly worthy.” She hopes to be able to travel safely in the late summer of 2021 to study and photograph six obscure or undigitized manuscripts in London, Rome, Munich, and St. Gallen, Switzerland. These manuscripts reflect interesting compilation practices of medieval manuscript makers and will be important evidence in her analysis of medieval encyclopedic traditions.

Britt was also the recipient of two conference presentation awards last year. In July she presented her paper “The Narrative Framework of The Life of Antichrist and its Iterations in Late Fifteenth-Century German Book Illustration” at the virtual International Medieval Congress. For this paper Britt won the Sieglinde Hartmann Prize for the best paper proposal in the field of medieval German language and/or medieval German literature. More recently, in October Britt won the best paper award at the Ohio State University Medieval and Renaissance Studies Graduate Student Association (MRGSA) conference on Discipline & Interdisciplinarity for her presentation, “Reconstituting the Medieval Miscellany: How Interdisciplinarity Engenders Understanding of Multi-Text Manuscript Production.” Both presentations are informed by research for her dissertation and major field of study.

I feel so honored that this research is recognized by these great medieval studies organizations! It’s encouraging to know that they find my work on aspects of apocalypticism and knowledge-formation in late medieval Germany as fascinating as I do. I think it speaks volumes of the support I’ve had from my committee and especially my advisors, Rick Emmerson and Stephanie Leitch, for encouraging what I’m doing.