Dysert named 2018 ACRL ESS De Gruyter Grant Winner

CHICAGO – Anna Dysert, cataloguer librarian at McGill University, has been selected to receive the 2018 Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) European Studies Section (ESS) De Gruyter European Librarianship Study Grant for her project “A Survey of the Manuscripts of Isaac Israeli: The Transmission and Transformation of 12^th-Century Medicine.”

Sponsored by the Walter de Gruyter Foundation for Scholarship and Research, the grant provides €2,500 to support a trip to Europe. The primary criterion for awarding the grant is the significance and utility of the proposed project as a contribution to the study of the acquisition, organization or use of library resources from or relating to Europe.

Dysert will receive the award check during the 2018 ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans.

Dysert’s project focuses on a survey of the 12^th and 13^th-century manuscripts of Isaac Israeli’s “Dietae universals” and “Dietae particulares,” an influential yet understudied medical treatise of the 12^th century renaissance. The project involves the identification, dating, localization, and creation of detailed paleographical and codicological description of the manuscripts containing these texts.

“Dysert’s ambitious yet eminently executable, focused, and well-articulated proposal promises to accomplish several things simultaneously as a result of a 30-day resource sojourn in Germany,” said award co-chairs Katie Gibson of Miami University and Thomas Keenan of the Princeton University. “She targets a small complex of relevant manuscripts held in four German repositories and lays out a plan for their analysis via specific codicological and paleographic methods. This analysis has a narrower aim of re-contextualizing a manuscript held at Dysert’s home institution (McGill University’s Osler Library of the History of Medicine) and a broader objective to illuminate an under-explored aspect of the assimilation and dissemination of medical thought and practice of Arabic origin in Europe in the late Middle Ages.”

“Dysert’s formal training in codicology, paleography, and Western history, her experience as a professional librarian in a library of medical history, and her strong publishing record in library science and history of science encourage hopes that the expedition funded by the De Gruyter award will prove a highly productive one,” continued Gibson and Keenan. “We and the other members of the ACRL European Studies Section Award Committee are exceptionally pleased to be able to offer the award to Ms. Dysert this year.”

Dysert received her M.L.I.S. from McGill University and her M.A. from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies/Book History & Print Culture Collaborative Programme.

For more information regarding the ACRL ESS De Gruyter European Librarianship Study Grant, or a complete list of past recipients, please visit the awards section of the ACRL website.

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The Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) is the higher education association for librarians. Representing nearly 10,500 academic and research librarians and interested individuals, ACRL (a division of the American Library Association) develops programs, products and services to help academic and research librarians learn, innovate and lead within the academic community. Founded in 1940, ACRL is committed to advancing learning and transforming scholarship. ACRL is on the web at acrl.org, Facebook at facebook.com/ala.acrl and Twitter at @ala_acrl.