The Florida State University Art History faculty and graduate students invite current PhD and MA students to submit abstracts for papers to be presented at our 43rd annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium.
The Symposium will take place February 26–27, 2027, on our main campus in Tallahassee.
The Symposium committee welcomes papers that represent an advanced stage of original research from all areas of study within art and architectural history and visual and material culture. Paper sessions will take place Friday and Saturday, with research discussions following each paper. Papers presented at the Symposium are considered for publication in Athanor, an internationally distributed periodical edited in the Department of Art History and published by FSU Libraries.
The deadline for abstract submissions is December 1, 2026.
Please include the following in your application:
- Abstract (maximum 500 words), including a paper title.
- Current CV.
We encourage applicants to ask a faculty advisor to review the abstract before submission.
The Symposium keynote speaker this year will be Jennifer Borland, Fae Rawdon Norris Professor of the Humanities at Oklahoma State University. Dr. Borland is an art historian specializing in the art and architecture of medieval Europe. She is the founding Director of the OSU Center for the Humanities and managing co-editor of the open access online journal Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art.
Dr. Borland is the author of Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the Régime du corps (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), recipient of the 2024 Best First Book of Feminist Scholarship on the Middle Ages from the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, and the 2025 Karen Gould Prize in Art History from the Medieval Academy of America.
Symposium Committee
The Graduate Student Symposium has been hosted annually by the FSU Art History graduate students and faculty since 1981, continuing our long tradition of scholarship and hospitality. Since 2020, the event has been organized by the Graduate Student Symposium Committee, a rotating elected group of Art History MA and PhD students, three of whom serve as session chairs.
2026–27 Symposium Committee:
Serena D’Alessandro, Athanor Editor
Lydia McCollum, Athanor Co-editor
Maria Rodicio
Allison Iaconis
Bailey Ratliff
At left, members of 2025–26 Symposium committee. New committee photo coming soon!
History & Mission
Inaugurated in 1981, the FSU Art History Graduate Symposium participates in a long tradition of student conferences in our discipline. This open forum brings together students, professors, and members of the community to share ideas and expertise. We call it a symposium, with all the classical associations of that word, to suggest that it is not just a series of lectures, but a conversation.
Our purpose is to provide the opportunity for students to present the results of their scholarly efforts in twenty-minute talks, and to profit from the audience’s response. At the end of each paper, the speaker engages directly with the audience, both students and faculty, so that the ideas they present become the basis for further exploration. Each year we invite a distinguished scholar to deliver the keynote address and participate in these discussions. Keynote scholars have included Claudia Brittenham, Richard J. Powell, Elizabeth Cropper, Richard Schiff, Oleg Grabar, Alexander Nemerov, Barbara E. Mundy, Claire Farago, Felipe Pereda, Maria Gough, John T. Paoletti, Heather Igloliorte, and Charlene Villaseñor Black.
Sharing research, meeting others in our field, creating long-lasting friendships and professional associations – these vital interchanges are at the core of the FSU Symposium experience. We seek to broaden the professional, personal, and academic horizons of every participant: the visiting young scholar, the returning alumnus, the local undergraduate considering graduate work — and of course the professors, who also learn a great deal in the process.
Athanor
Our symposium is distinguished from similar gatherings because it was conceived from the start to result in a publication. Student speakers are able to submit their papers to our journal Athanor, published here since 1981. The manuscript goes through several stages of editing before coming to fruition in the final article, which have been published and shared with more than 300 libraries and institutions across America and Europe. In the interest of conservation and innovation, in 2019 we transformed Athanor to an online publication, now edited by a graduate student editor on the Symposium Committee and published by FSU Libraries: Athanor.
