Rewarding Research: Doctoral Fellowships & Grants

Carolina Alarcon has been awarded a Fulbright U.S. Student Program grant for dissertation research in Spain for the 2015-2016 academic year. She has also received an International Dissertation Semester Research Fellowship from the FSU Graduate School for the summer semester 2015. Carolina is currently researching at the University of Valencia’s López Piñero Institute for the History of Medicine and Science.  She will be traveling to London during the summer to conduct research at the Wellcome Library.  Her research examines how printed images effectively interpreted and broadcasted early modern understandings of medicine and anatomy. Her research aims to tie agents of Spanish anatomical medicine to the broader history of natural science and medical knowledge during the Renaissance by offering analyses of a cluster of anatomical images produced by Spanish physicians during the sixteenth century. 

Sarah Buck received the departmental Penelope E. Mason and Friends of Art History Dissertation Research Grants for research trips to London, Paris, New York City, and Boston in 2014. In major research libraries and museums Sarah examined the prints of Les Costumes Grotesques, a collection of one hundred seventeenth-century French prints by the Larmessin, a family of Parisian engravers active during the reign of Louis XIV.  Each of these prints features an elegantly-posed “tradesman” whose body is rendered imaginatively out of the instruments and tools of his occupation. Sarah’s dissertation argues that the prints of the Costumes embodied complex perceptions of French involvement in early-modern commerce and towards ancien régime consumerism.

Brad Hostetler has been awarded a Junior Fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard) for the 2015-16 academic year. He will be one of four Junior Fellows in Byzantine Studies, and of these, the only art historian and the only student from a North American university. Brad will be in residence in Washington, DC completing his dissertation, “The Function of Text: Byzantine Reliquaries with Metrical Inscriptions, 843-1204.” Brad’s research incorporates an under-utilized body of evidence—the metrical dedicatory inscriptions, or epigrams, inscribed upon Middle Byzantine reliquaries–examining the ways in which reliquaries and the inscribed dedications functioned in Byzantium.

Kristi Peterson has been awarded the departmental Penelope  E. Mason and Friends of Art History awards for dissertation research in the summer and fall of 2015. With these awards, Kristi will conduct research in archives, libraries, and museums in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Mexico City. In the summer of 2014, Kristi was awarded a Nahuatl Program Scholarship from the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies at Yale University to further her study of the indigenous language of central Mexico. Her dissertation, “Consumption and Construction: Devotional Images and the Place of Empire in Postclassic Mexico, 1325-1521,” examines pre-Columbian central Mexican examples of devotional sculpture and the manner in which they engage with the creation of place and identity through a negotiation of the sacred within the cultural landscape.

Bryan Schaeffer has been awarded an International Dissertation Semester Research Fellowship in the amount of $7,000 from the Graduate School at FSU. Bryan will spend the fall semester of 2015 doing archival and field research in Mexico City, Puebla and Oaxaca. His dissertation project is tentatively entitled “The Interplay of Movement and Place: Visual Narratives of Travel in the Mixtec Codices,” an examination and visual analysis of the significance of several aspects of travel as portrayed in the sacred books of the ancient Mixtec.

Heather Lundy has also received an International Dissertation Semester Research Fellowship in the amount of $7,000 from the FSU Graduate School.  She will conduct archival research in Merida and field work at the Maya site of Ek’ Balam in the Yucatán Peninsula during the fall 2015 semester. Her dissertation, “Architecture and Placemaking at a Northern Maya City: Ek’ Balam and the Question of Style,” explores the architectural landscape at Ek’ Balam built under the rulership of Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’.  Heather uses the concept of placemaking to understand the unique architectural mélange created at Ek’ Balam in order to question the very notion of architectural styles and how the built environment crafts site-specific identities. In the 2014-15 academic year Heather conducted research as an research  at the Ringling Musem of Art, photographing and cataloguing their collection of pre-Colombian artifacts.

Jennifer Pride  received a Dissertation Research Grant from the FSU Graduate School as well as a Friends of Art History Award in support of her research travels in 2014. She traveled in the summer to France to conduct archival research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, and  Institut national d’histoire de l’art. In the fall Jennifer visited San Francisco to investigate Honoré Daumier prints at the Achenbach Foundation. Jennifer also received funding  for five conference presentations in 2014, including departmental and Congress of Graduate Research grants and a grant from the Modern Language Association.