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9/16/2026

Art History Research Notes

Art History
Student and Faculty Travels, Exhibitions, Presentations, and Publications

Fall 2026

Doctoral candidate Madison Gilmore-Duffey has been awarded a fellowship as a member of the inaugural 2026–2027 class of Dissertation Fellows at FSU’s new Humanities Center. The Humanities Center brings together scholars from diverse disciplines to engage and inspire each other’s research. This year’s topic is “the Human in the Humanities.” Madison’s dissertation, “The Classical Past in the Art of Late Antique Byzantium,” examines how antiquities—objects predating the 4th century CE—served as visual displays of historical narrative in the Hippodrome of Late Antique Constantinople. She demonstrates how these objects’ meanings emerged through the reciprocal relationship between viewer and object.”

This summer, Associate Professor Tenley Bick presented “’Visualizzare una rappresentazione di soggetti neri all’interno del territorio italiano’: On Italian Landscape, Race, and Environmental Vision in the Work of Silvia Rosi” at the American Association for Italian Studies Conference in Sassari, Sardinia, Italy. She also has an upcoming invited international guest lecture, based on her published research on the work of contemporary Italian-Togolese artist Silvia Rosi, to be given virtually to the Department of Humanities, Università degli Studi di Trento (Italy), on October 1 at 10am EST, as part of the series Confini instabili (Unstable Borders), with scientific organization by Serena Luzzi and Denis Viva. The lecture is entitled: “La fotografia italiana, la diaspora, e l’Italia nella ricerca artistica di Silvia Rosi.” FSU students are welcome to attend virtually; please note: the lecture and event will be in Italian. Also this fall, Dr. Bick will present a guest lecture and book talk on Michelangelo Pistoletto: Figuration and Cultural Politics (Yale University Press, 2025) in Modern Languages and Linguistics at FSU, to be held October 19 at 5 pm. Earlier this year, Dr. Bick’s book was awarded the prestigious American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS) Book Prize, in the category of Visual Studies; read more here.

Associate Professor Paul Niell co-edited “Black Artists in the Atlantic World,” a special issue of Arts, with FSU Art History alumna Emily K. Thames (PhD ’22), Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Arkansas, Little Rock. This special issue considers the long arc of artistic production by Black artists in the Atlantic World from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Articles focus on a wide variety of places, including Mexico City; Salvador de Bahia, Brazil; Lima, Trujillo, and the Nazca region of Peru; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and Boston in the US; among others. Among the authors is another FSU Art History alumna, Kristi M. Peterson (PhD ’17), Assistant Professor of Art History at Skidmore College. The wide range of case studies reviews striking comparisons between the lives and work of Black artists who struggled, persevered, and shaped the representational landscapes of the Atlantic World.

In the summer of 2026, doctoral candidate Danelle Bernten presented a Juneteenth lecture on paintings and sculptures of US-American enslaved and freed minors, “Children of Men: Fielding US Southern Landscapes of Enslavement and Freedom in the Artworks of William Walker and Woodrow Nash,” at the 621 Gallery in Tallahassee, FL. Additionally, Danelle’s essay “Race Against Time: Making Inroads at the Munree Cemetery and the Unmarked Black Grave” was published in the Florida Department of State Historical Resources book Revival of Buried Kinfolks: Reconnecting African American Family History of Lost and Found Relatives.
 
Michael Carrasco, CFA Associate Dean and Art History Interim Chair, has several research presentations this year: In the summer, he presented with a research team on the spread of cycad scale and the resulting heritage loss, first with “The Spread of Cycad Aulacaspis Scale in the Amami Islands, Japan: Current Status and Ongoing Research” at the 13th International Conference on Cycad Biology in Sydney, Australia, and then with “Biocultural Collapse in the Amami Islands: Sotetsu Decline and the Fragility of Island Heritage in the Anthropocene” at the Island Studies International Conference in Tacloban City, Leyte, Philippines. In October he will present “Mesoamerican Food Worlds: Creation, Reciprocity, and Phagodynamics” at the Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Symposium Culinary Arts in a Pre-Columbian World: Disciplined Tastes and Gastronomic Expressions.
Doctoral candidate Sheila Scoville participated in the summer seminar “Ecology and Empire” organized by the Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society. Hosted at the AAS’s national research library in Worcester, MA, and led by Maggie Cao, associate professor of art history at UNC Chapel Hill, the seminar examined the intersections of ecology and empire in the nineteenth century through discussions, workshops, guest presentations, and a field trip to the New Bedford Whaling Museum. In publication news, Sheila’s article “A House of Wild Agave: Diasporic Ecologies in Colonial Mexican Manuscripts” is included in a special issue of Numen: International Review for the History of Religions (Volume 73: 5–6), which will be published in October 2026. Sheila presented her paper “México Profundo Rebooted: Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s Nahua-tronics” at the 114th Annual Conference of the College Art Association held in Chicago, IL, in February 2026. She will return to CAA in 2027 in New York City to present “The Agave Landscape: Relational Ecologies in Nahua History Painting” on a panel for emerging scholars hosted by the Association for Latin American Art. In addition, Sheila’s paper “The Agave Landscape: Relational Ecologies in Colonial Mexican” has been accepted for individual presentation at the annual conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Richmond, VA, March 31–April 3, 2027. 
Vincent V. & Agatha Thursby Professor Lorenzo Pericolo has several lectures this year and a new book coming soon:
  • “Guido Reni Social,” at the conference “Interpretare Guido Reni: Contesti, Funzioni, Significati,” Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Barberini, Rome (May 21, 2026).
  • Keynote lecture: “Peintures épistémiques: Le Portrait d’Antonietta Gonzalez par Lavinia Fontana et le Portrait de Maddalena Ventura par Jusepe de Ribera,” at the Université d’Été, Institut national d’histoire de l’Art, Paris (July 9, 2026).
  • “Pleasure and Horror: on Jusepe de Ribera’s Two Versions of Apollo and Marsyas,” at the international conference “Pleasure as the Aim of Art? The Place of Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century: European Art Theory and Practice,” University of Lausanne, Switzerland (November 27, 2026).
  • “From Estampa to Bosquejo: Francisco de Zurbarán and the Palimpsest of Painting,” international conference “Zurbarán et le Paradigme de l’Artist Dévot,” Musée du Louvre, Paris (January 20, 2027).

His new book, The Elemental Body: Natural Philosophy and Medicine in Louis Finson’s Four Elements, will be published in December, 2026, by Brepols Publishing.

Doctoral candidate Sara I. Rodríguez Rivera participated in the Rutgers Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration (R/PRAC) Summer 2026 internship at the General Archive of Puerto Rico. Working alongside fellow interns and archivists, Rodríguez Rivera helped organize the Ponce Judicial District Records (Fondo Judicial del Distrito de Ponce), a collection spanning more than a century of judicial documentation from Ponce and surrounding municipalities. The project involved arranging criminal case files chronologically and geographically and identifying previously uncatalogued groups of records. The project culminated in a new archival guide documenting 679 boxes of records, providing researchers with greater access to Ponce’s judicial and social history. In addition, Rodríguez Rivera collaborated with fellow intern Dante Requena on the preservation of a second collection of inheritance tax records. Her encounters with the judicial records have since inspired an ongoing essay using Juvenile Court cases from the 1930s to examine Ponce’s social and architectural landscape, exploring how these records can offer new ways of studying space, everyday life, and architecture within art history.