Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Andrew Lu ’24 is an undergraduate concentrating in comparative literature (English and French) and the history of art and architecture. He is broadly interested in how the “medieval” informs and disrupts modern constructions of time, race, gender, perception, and ability. His thesis project, tentatively titled “Devouring Stone: Rethinking the Monstrous in Romanesque Monastic Sculpture,” turns a critical eye to the carved stone creatures of 12th-century Languedoc monasteries, probing their paradoxical proliferation in religious spaces through questions of embodiment, alterity, and subjecthood. Through a polychronic approach that constellates materiality and historicity with theory — drawing simultaneously from hagiography, material culture, and cross-disciplinary postmodern thought — he seeks to unearth from medieval sculptural assemblages an urgency of the now. He also edits magazines such as XO Magazine and The Forager and interns at the Met Cloisters.