This fall, UT Dallas students will have an unprecedented opportunity to learn about The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art from an all-star roster of scholars.

Rick Brettell

Dr. Rick Brettell

Dr. Rick Brettell, the UT Dallas Margaret McDermott Distinguished Chair of Art and Aesthetics, will teach the course jointly with two SMU medieval literature and history professors, Dr. Bonnie Wheeler and Dr. Jeremy Adams.

Scholars from Queen’s College, Rutgers University, The University of Illinois, Bowdoin College, Trinity University and the University of Iowa will also lecture.

The seminar – Majesty, Memory and Mourning in the Late Middle Ages – is open to UT Dallas undergraduate and graduate students and will meet weekly at the DMA from Aug. 26 to Dec. 2.

The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy will be on display at the Dallas Museum of Art from Oct. 3 to  Jan. 2. The exhibit features a sequence of masterful alabaster funerary sculptures from 15th-century Dijon, France.  The works embody the courtly, chivalric, monastic and artistic aspects of the Burgundian court, which was among the most brilliant in late medieval and early Renaissance Europe.

Students will study the interwoven development of the political, social, religious, literary and artistic strands of human culture in medieval France and neighboring countries that is embodied in these sculptures. The course explores uncharted territory by using works on exhibit as an occasion to bring the best local and national scholars to provide an exemplary context for a full understanding of these masterpieces, as well as the culture that created them.

“Because The Mourners is an unprecedented and never-to-be-repeated exhibition, we decided to design a university course in connection with it that shares those two qualities,” Dr. Brettell said. “Not only is it a collaboration among the scholars of medieval and early Renaissance art, literature, and history in the DFW metroplex, but it also brings to Dallas each of the major scholars in this area from universities throughout the country. Never before – and perhaps never again – will undergraduate and graduate students from UT Dallas and SMU have access to such a broad array of scholars investigating a single topic.”