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PhD Candidate Erin Dickey receives CASVA Twenty-Four Month Chester Dale Fellowship

May 16, 2022

The Department is thrilled to announce the award of a CASVA Twenty-Four Month Chester Dale Fellowship to our doctoral student Erin Dickey. This prestigious fellowship provides funding for a year of independent research and a second year in residence at the Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Erin’s dissertation on the convergence of networked technologies and feminist art in the 1980s, focusing on the under-studied artists Judy Malloy (1942-), Nancy Paterson (1957-2018), and Karen O’Rourke (1951-) whose works probe the political and aesthetic processes underlying the “information age,” is supervised by Professor Cary Levine.

Congratulations Erin!

PhD Candidate Emily DuVall receives 2022-2023 Wilson Library Fellowship

April 22, 2022

Congratulations to Emily DuVall, who has received the 2022-2023 Hanes Graduate Fellowship (Rare Book Collection Fellowship) through Wilson Library at UNC Libraries. Her dissertation project is “Power and Possession: The French Conceptualization of Royal Space during the Reign of François I.” 

New publication from PhD candidate Andrea Snow

March 21, 2022

PhD candidate Andrea C. Snow has published a new article in Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft. Titled “Distorted, Dismembered, Diffused: Rethinking the Body in Old Norse Material Culture,” it examines the strange and schematized bodies that populate Viking Age art.

Abstract:
From the late-eighth through the early-twelfth centuries, medieval Norse objects represented the human body in varying states of ambiguity. While the Latin West would establish conventions for representing figures that visibly asserted the emotive expressivity of the face and body to circumscribe the beholder’s expected emotional (and spiritual) comportment, the figures represented in medieval Norse art are lacking in physiognomic distinctions such as defined facial features or somatic expressions of emotion. If their anatomical configurations do not appear to convey behavioral codes, then what could they refer to? What cultural factors contributed to their distortion, and how were they read by their intended beholders? This article argues that such enigmatic bodies did not represent human anatomy as it appeared before the eye, but gestured to a broad, flexible, and supernatural corporeality that transgressed the divisions between divine, human, and animal of Latin Western art and thought.

You can read it online now via ProjectMUSE! (link for HTML-ing is here: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/47556)

Borre-style disc brooch, Viking, 9th-10th c., found in Gotland, Sweden, now in the British Museum, London
Borre-style disc brooch, Viking, 9th-10th c., found in Gotland, Sweden, now in the British Museum, London

PhD Alumna Shawnya Harris-curated show listed as one of Hyperallergic’s Best of 2021

December 9, 2021

Congratulations to PhD Alumna Shawnya Harris, whose exhibition “Emma Amos: Color Odyssey” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was listed as one of Hyperallergic’s Best of 2021. Shawnya put together the first major retrospective for Amos, the only woman and youngest person to be invited to join Spiral, a New York-based collective of African American artists active in the 1960s and ’70s.