Megan C. McNamee

Predoctoral Research Fellow

University of Michigan

Funded by the ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship

Residence: September 1, 2012 - August 31, 2013

Profile

Megan is a doctorial candidate in the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her work explores period-specific notions of perception, cognition, and representation in the Latin-speaking world around the turn of the first millennium. She is especially interested in the intersections between education and aesthetics—how the standard course of education, the seven liberal arts, fostered particular approaches to and expectations of images on the part of their makers and viewers. She is in the process of completing her dissertation, Picturing Number in the Central Middle Ages, which investigates the role of the visual in cultivating numeracy during the tenth and eleventh centuries. The project is situated in the monastic school of Fleury and the cathedral school of Reims, and grounded in those manuscripts dedicated to the quadrivium, the four arts of number—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music—that were made, copied, and used by these communities. Megan's research is currently supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.