Julie Harris, second Center for Spain in America Fellow at the Clark Institute
The fellowship has been awarded to Julie Harris, adjunct faculty at Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership, Chicago since 2010. Harris holds a degree in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. At the Clark, she will be working on a project concerning the function, sources and meaning of ornamental carpet pages in Hebrew Bibles made in Iberia or its cultural sphere ca. 1260–1320. It considers a wide range of cross-cultural scholarship on ornament and the carpet page as well as factors within the realm of Sepharad such as: Hiddur Mitzvah and the self-production of these codices; prayer and the Jewish sensorium; the role of Masora and micrography; and Biblical notions of artistic creativity.
