Brittany Forniotis (MA 2019, now studying for her Ph.D. at Duke) recently published her first article in Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 52 (2021). It’s available here via Project MUSE: “Out of Sight, out of Mind: Italian Lazzaretti and Collective Trauma in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Italian Cities.” (non-subscribers can still read the abstract)
Learn about one of our newest faculty members’ research in UNC’s Endeavors Magazine! Kathryn Desplanque talks about her work in “Setting the Art World Ablaze.”
PhD Candidate Andrea C. Snow has been invited to contribute teaching materials to the innovative new survey textbook, The History of Art: A Global View: Prehistory to the Present (Thames & Hudson, forthcoming).
A brief window into what this textbook will provide:
The History of Art: A Global View is the first major art history survey textbook — written by a team of expert authors — with a global narrative in mind. A chronological organization and “Seeing Connections” features help readers make cross-cultural comparisons, while brief, modular chapters (with on-page definitions) offer instructors unparalleled flexibility.
Andrea is excited to be supplementing the textbook with overview slides that feature the key concepts and works of art from two of its chapters.
Associate Professor Lyneise Williams will be speaking this Thursday, October 28, at 3 pm for a Faculty Fellow Presentation at the Institute for African American Research. The presentation will be via Zoom. Williams will explore the ways notions of glamour, celebrity, and masculinity intersect with race, technology, and sports in “Model Athlete: Alfonso Teofilo Brown and the Construction of the Glamourous Black Athlete in 1920s Paris.”
The African Studies Center presents
Vanessa Tembane
Existing in the Shadow
Online Exhibition: October 1-31
Special Event: In Dialogue: Vanessa Tembane & Professor Tanya Shields, Women’s and Gender Studies
Thursday, October 28: 4:30-5:30 pm
Vanessa Tembane (b. 1995) is a South African born artist, with Mozambican heritage, currently based in Johannesburg. Tembane holds a Master of Fine Arts. Tembane works primarily in collage and digital print media. Her work is inspired by her mother’s narratives and explores how they have influenced her identity and sense of belonging. Her collages allow her to merge her photographs that were taken in South Africa with those of her Mozambican relatives and to create strange hybridized composites. The collages combine photographic cut-outs with details of swathes of fabric – capulanas – that were given to Tembane by her grandmother and aunts during occasional visits to Mozambique. Tembane’s collages become a means of telling stories about her origins and what is in some sense an alternative “home” culture, albeit one she mostly experienced indirectly. They enable her to identify with her mother’s country of origin by constructing new imagined memories for herself, and through this, to achieve a sense of belonging.
Ph.D. alumnus Michael Yonan is one of the first contributing scholars to the new digital journal, Materia: Journal of Technical Art History. This biannual publication provides an online, open-access platform devoted to the technical study of art objects. Bringing together the disciplines of conservation, conservation science, art history, and related fields, Materia is among the first peer-reviewed publications dedicated solely to this steadily growing field of interdisciplinary research. You can start your first dive into reading Materia with Michael’s article, “Technical Art History and the Art Historical Thing.” Michael is Alan Templeton Endowed Professor of European Art 1600–1830 at the University of California, Davis.
David G. Frey Assistant Professor Maggie Cao has been named a National Humanities Center Fellow for 2021-2022. She was awarded the Allen W. Clowes Fellowship and Kent R. Mullikin Fellowship to work on her book project Painting and the Making of American Empire‚ 1830–1898. You can read more about the NHC awards here: https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/national-humanities-center-announces-2021-22-fellows/
The website Five Books recently published a review by Marc Michael Epstein highlighting Dorothy Verkerk’s book Early Medieval Bible Illumination and the Ashburnham Pentateuch as one of the five best books on reinterpreting medieval art. You can read the full review here: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/reinterpreting-medieval-art-marc-michael-epstein/. Verkerk’s book is innovative, Epstein says, because her “brilliant analysis -. . . says that one can read across the page chiasmically, like an ‘X’. Or one can skip and go back. In other words, it seems that the reading of images is not necessarily linear, sequential and chronological.” Congratulations Dorothy!
PhD Candidate Andrea C. Snow has published a review of Caroline Walker Bynum’s latest book, Dissimilar Similitudes: Devotional Objects in Late Medieval Europe (Brooklyn: Zone, 2020) in Religion and the Arts. Check it out here: https://brill.com/view/journals/rart/25/1-2/article-p199_11.xml?language=en
The editors have invited Andrea to be a repeat reviewer. She looks forward to working with them in the near future.
Congratulations to Mara West, who has just been appointed the new Instruction and Reference Librarian at Minot State University in North Dakota! She will take up the position in April 2021.
