Art History Graduate Symposium
The Department of Art History at Florida State University will host the 41st Annual Graduate Student Symposium on February 28–March 1, 2025, 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.
The Symposium keynote speaker this year will be Dr. Elizabeth Cropper, a specialist in Italian and French Renaissance and Baroque art and art literature and Dean Emerita of the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA). Prior to her 20-year post as dean of CASVA, Dr. Cropper was professor of art history at The Johns Hopkins University and director of the Johns Hopkins Charles S. Singleton Center for Italian Studies at Villa Spelman in Florence. Among her many publications are The Domenichino Affair: Novelty, Imitation, and Theft in Seventeenth-Century Rome (2005), Pontormo: Portrait of a Halberdier (1997), and The Ideal of Painting: Pietro Testa’s Düsseldorf Notebook (1984). Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting, co-authored with Charles Dempsey (1996), was awarded both the Mitchell Prize for the best book in English that year, and the Charles Rufus Morey Prize of the College Art Association.
Call for Papers
We invite current PhD and MA students to submit abstracts for papers to be presented at the 41st annual Symposium. The Symposium committee welcomes papers that represent an advanced stage of original research from all areas of study within art and architectural history and material culture. Paper sessions will take place on Friday and Saturday with discussions following each speaker. Papers presented will be considered for inclusion in our journal Athanor. 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 paper before submission.
The deadline for submission is December 14, 2024.
Send abstracts and CV to FSUSymposium@gmail.com.
2024–25 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 Representatives
Leila Al-Shibibi, Anna Demas, Viktor Okuka
PhD Representatives
Madison Gilmore-Duffey (Athanor Editor), Quentin Clark (Athanor Co-editor), Lydia McCollum, Emily White
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.
