Congratulations
…to all who participated in our 40th Annual Graduate Symposium on March 1 & 2, 2024! Graduate students from nine universities presented and discussed their research with FSU students, faculty, and community members. This year marked the first in-person Symposium entirely planned by an elected committee of graduate students, continuing our 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 address was delivered this year by Dr. Richard Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. Dr. Powell, a leading scholar in the field of African American art and culture, presented “Blackbeats: Cubism Reimagined.”
Each year one student paper is selected by the faculty on the basis of originality and presentation for the Günther Stamm Prize, in memory of a founding professor of the Department of Art History. This year the Stamm Prize was awarded to Danelle Bernten for her paper “Illicit Possessions: Coded Argent Automation on Eighteenth-Century Black Necks.”
The Graduate Student Symposium has been hosted annually by the FSU Art History graduate students and faculty since 1981. Since 2020, the event has been organized by the Graduate Student Symposium Committee, a rotating elected group of Art History MA and PhD students, three of whom serve as session chairs.
Photo Gallery
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.
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.
