Art History Graduate Symposium
The Department of Art History at Florida State University will host the 42nd Annual Graduate Student Symposium on March 6–7, 2026, on our main campus in Tallahassee, Florida. This annual event features presentations by and discussions with a distinguished keynote speaker and graduate students in art history and related fields from around the country and the world. The Symposium is organized by an elected committee of graduate students and hosted by all Art History students and faculty, sustaining a long tradition of scholarship and hospitality. Papers presented at the Symposium are considered for publication in Athanor, an internationally distributed periodical published by FSU Libraries.
KEYNOTE LECTURE
Claudia Brittenham
“Telling Time: Periodization, Analogy, and Mesoamerican History”
Friday, March 6, 4pm, 2005 WJB
The Symposium keynote speaker this year will be Claudia Brittenham, Mary R. Morton Professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is also Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Her research focuses on the art of Mesoamerica, with interests in the materiality of art and the politics of style. She is the author of Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica, as well as The Murals of Cacaxtla: The Power of Painting in Ancient Central Mexico; The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak (with Mary Miller); and Veiled Brightness: A History of Ancient Maya Color (with Stephen Houston and colleagues). Her next book focuses on the interconnectedness of the ancient Mesoamerican world.
Paper sessions begin on Friday afternoon, March 6 at 1:00 pm. Invited graduate students from around the country will present 20-minute talks, each followed by a short discussion with the audience. Dr. Brittenham will present the keynote lecture after the first paper session on Friday afternoon, and on Saturday, student paper sessions will continue at 9:30 am and 1:00 pm.
2025–26 Graduate Symposium Committee
Since 2020, the FSU Art History Graduate Symposium has been organized by a rotating elected group of Art History MA and PhD students, three of whom serve as session chairs.
MA Representative
Anna Vincent
PhD Representatives
Quentin Clark (Athanor Editor), Serena D’Alessandro (Athanor Co-editor), Isabel Brady, Hudson Kauffman
Faculty Advisors
Jean Hudson, Lorenzo Pericolo
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 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.
