Art History Graduate Students to Present at Oxford
Art History Ph.D. students Sarah Simmons and Christopher Timm have been invited to present papers at Oxford University’s Byzantine Society XVI International Graduate Conference. This year’s focus is ‘The City and the Cities: From Constantinople to the Frontier.’ The conference takes place February 28 – March 1.
Simmons, an FSU Graduate School Legacy Fellow, is developing a dissertation project that re-examines the role of art at the end of the Iconoclastic Controversy. She has presented aspects of this project at several major conferences. The title of her Oxford talk is “Pious Power and Powerful Piety: Adapting the Byzantine Model of Imperial Piety to Balkan Representations of Authority.” In it, she reframes Bulgarian and Rus’ representations of power as an active integration—rather than a passive appropriation—of Byzantine imperial iconography.
Timm, a Patricia Rose Teaching Fellow in Art History, is currently conducting research on the so-called Macedonian dynasty in the Middle Byzantine period (843-1204), focusing on the use of art and ceremony to construct and convey dynastic legitimacy and stability. He will do primary research this summer in Istanbul and Venice, funded by a Mason Dissertation Research Grant. His paper for the Oxford conference is titled, “Celebrating Usurpation: Elijah and ‘Macedonian’ Dynastic Ideology in Urban Constantinople.”
