Leah Sherman’s research interests are in 20th-century museum history. Her dissertation concerns the rise of internationalist museographic and cultural heritage practices, concurrent with the rise of UNESCO and ICOM in the years following World War II. In 2019, she was recognized by her peers as the doctoral student winner of the I. N. Winbury Award for her paper “Examining Internationalism in Postwar Italy: A New Assessment of Lucio Fontana’s Struttura al neon and the Argentinian Avant-Garde.” From the FSU Department of Art History, Leah has received the Helen J. Beard Conference Travel Grant to present virtually her research on postwar Poland’s Museobus mobile museum program at the AMPS Prague-Heritages conference in June 2023. She is also a recipient of the Penelope E. Mason Dissertation Research Award to conduct dissertation research in several archives and museums across France and Italy. Besides pursuing her doctoral degree she is also Associate library faculty, serving as the Visual & Performing Arts Librarian at Florida State University. In this capacity she acts as subject liaison to all departments within the College of Fine Arts including the FSU Museum of Fine Arts and Ringling Museum, and she remains an active member of several related professional organizations such as ARLIS (Art Libraries Society of North America), ACRL (Association of College & Research Libraries), and CAA (College Art Association.) Most recently she served at the President of the ARLIS/Southeast Chapter in 2020.

Leah graduated with Honors and Phi Beta Kappa from Florida State University with a BA in Art History and minors in International Affairs and Italian Studies in 2010. In 2012 she completed her MA in Art History at FSU, which culminated in her graduate thesis, “Institution versus Individuality: Rethinking Unity in Early Italian Futurism.” As a master’s student she served a term as President of the FSU Art History Association. In 2016, Leah completed her second master’s degree at Florida State in Library and Information Science.