Doctoral candidate Caitlin Mims is the recipient of a Fulbright Greece-Turkey Joint Research Award for the 2023-24 academic year. This joint award is provided by the Greek and Turkish Fulbright Commissions and allows students to engage in comparative trans-regional research and/or study. Caitlin will conduct research at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and at Marmara University in Istanbul.  

“I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to conduct dissertation research in Greece and Türkiye and to represent the United States as a Fulbright Research Award recipient,” said Mims. “Many thanks are due to my advisor Lynn Jones, the Department of Art History, and the Office of National Fellowships for their mentorship and support of my project.”

While abroad, Caitlin will study a group of Byzantine amulets which depict the “wandering womb” and were used to treat gynecological issues in women. This group is vital evidence of the intersection of magic, medicine, and religion in the Middle Byzantine period. She will examine amulets in the collections of the Benaki Museum and the Athens Numismatic Museum while in Greece and the Haluk Perk Collection, the Rezan Has Museum, and the Istanbul Archeological Museum in Türkiye.

“Earning a Fulbright scholarship is a rare honor,” said Lorenzo Pericolo, chair of the Department of Art History. “It requires a solid research project, carefully formulated and promising in its outcomes. Caitlin worked hard to succeed in this. She and students like her set the example for new generations of doctoral candidates.

Administered by the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright Student Awards program offers grants for recent college graduates, graduate students, and young professionals to study, research, and/or teach English in participating countries around the world for one year. Caitlin is one of nine outstanding Florida State University graduate students and alumni who were awarded Fulbrights for the 2023–24 academic year.

Related article: Nine FSU students earn Fulbright Scholarships

We are excited to introduce Dr. Brendan Weaver, who joins the FSU Department of Art History this fall as Visiting Assistant Professor. Dr. Weaver is an historical archaeologist focusing on material culture and the built environment, including visual arts and architecture, among indigenous and African-descended peoples of Latin America. His current research is focused on power, aesthetics, and memory among enslaved Afro-Andeans in Spanish colonial and early republican Peru.

I’m absolutely delighted to be joining this dynamic department, with a dedicated faculty doing a range of remarkable work focused on material and visual cultures and such creative and curious students with diverse interests.

Weaver looks forward to building the range of courses available in the Visual Cultures of the Americas program, especially with an eye to Andean South America and African descended cultures. He draws on his theoretical expertise in material aesthetics, power, and memory for his Spring Semester graduate seminar “Archaeologies of Memory, Art, and Architecture.” In the coming year he will also deploy instruction in digital methods aimed at enriching the MCHS program.

Prior to coming to FSU, Dr, Weaver was a Lecturer of African Diaspora Archaeology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (2022-23), Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Archaeology Center (California, 2018-2022), the Mellon Institute Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Anthropology at Berea College (Kentucky, 2016-2018), and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities, Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland, 2015-2016).

Since 2009, Weaver has directed the Haciendas of Nasca Archaeological Project (PAHN), centered on Nasca’s Ingenio Valley, the first project to archaeologically study the African diaspora in what is today the Republic of Peru. The interdisciplinary project explores the material culture, political aesthetics, and quotidian experience of enslaved African-descended laborers at two 17th- and 18th-century wine estates formerly owned by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) on Peru’s South Coast. His forthcoming monograph, Fruit of the Vine, Work of Human Hands: An Archaeology of Slavery and Aesthetics at the Jesuit Vineyards of Nasca, Peru, results from this research and asks two central questions: 1) What were the material conditions for the production of enslaved subjectivities on these estates? and 2) as a result of this material experience, how did enslaved actors produce and engage in meaning making? Both of these questions are advanced through innovative aesthetic and semiotic approaches to power and enslaved praxis.