From the August 2017 Desktop News | University of Alabama rising senior Sommer Hallquist was selected for a highly competitive summer internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Cloisters in New York City.

The Met Cloisters is a museum specializing in medieval art, architecture, and gardens, and it is a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Hallquist is double majoring in art history and anthropology and is one of eight students from across the United States to be selected for the internship out of about 140 applicants.

“I applied for the internship back in January and was notified that I received an interview for a position in late February,” Hallquist said. “I, along with 30 others, was invited to travel to New York City for interviews with the museum’s education department at the beginning of March.

“While at work later that month, I received an exciting call from the museum saying that I had received a position.”

Dr. Jennifer Feltman, an assistant professor of medieval art and architecture at UA, said the internship is going to make a major difference in Hallquist’s professional development.

“I’ve been working with Sommer over the past year,” Feltman said. “She already has a bright future, but this will open up so many opportunities for her. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Cloisters is the premier museum of medieval art in the United States.

“She’ll have the chance to meet curators at the museum where she’ll receive training in museum education. She’ll learn about the collection at the Cloisters, which is housed in a French medieval monastery reconstructed in Manhattan. That’s why it’s called the Cloisters.”

As an intern, Hallquist conducts gallery teaching at the museum, using objects in the museum’s collection to instruct participants in the museum’s children’s day camps about various aspects of medieval art and culture.

She also had the opportunity to conduct her own research project focusing on objects within the Met Cloisters’ collection.

Hallquist has been conducting an independent study on the images of the Antichrist in the “Bible moralisée Codex Vindo bonensis 2554, Vienna, Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek,” which is a thirteenth-century moralized French Bible made for the Capetians, a royal family of France.

Moralized Bibles are highly illustrated Bibles created in France in the thirteenth-century that were used to help rulers be ethical.

Hallquist said while much of her work has focused upon these medieval representations of Antichrist within Vienna 2554, an equal amount of her work has focused upon representations of kingship within the manuscript.

At the end of her internship, Hallquist will present the findings of her research project to the general public at the museum.