UAB, UA 20th annual Graduate Student Symposium, March 6

The Joint Program for the M.A. in Art History combines resources from each school to provide a stronger program. It offers the only graduate degree in art history in the state.

art symposiumPhoto credit: Scrapbook image, late 19th century, Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, no. 70x1.7, Winterthur Library, Winterthur, Delaware.Seven graduate student speakers from the Joint Program for the Master of Arts in Art History of the University of Alabama at Birmingham and University of Alabama will speak Friday, March 6, as part of the 20th annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History.

The symposium is sponsored and shared by the UAB College of Arts and SciencesDepartment of Art and Art History and the UA Department of Art and Art History. The event alternates between the campuses each year; this year it will be held in Tuscaloosa, in UA’s Ferguson Student Center, Anderson Society Room 313. Sessions will take place from 9 a.m.-3 p.m. The keynote lecture is set for 3:30 p.m. in Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library, Room 205.  

The Joint Program for the M.A. in Art History began in 1987. The program combines resources from each school and from their communities to provide a stronger program than either could offer alone. The joint program offered the first, and still the only, graduate degree in art history in the state of Alabama.

Students will present their research during the symposium. Barbara Mooney, Ph.D., associate professor of American art and architecture at the University of Iowa and a leading scholar in race and architecture, will give the keynote lecture. Mooney will present “From Jumping Jack to Jump Jim Crow: The Origins of a Pernicious Southern Stereotype” on the origins and evolution of racist imagery; a reception follows. Mooney is the author of “Prodigy Houses of Virginia: Architecture and the Native Elite” (University of Virginia Press, 2008). The public is invited to attend the sessions and the keynote lecture.

The symposium began in 1995 and was created by faculty on both campuses to bring students together to hear and be heard by eminent scholars working in the field of art history. Renowned scholars such as Paul Barolsky in the field of Italian Renaissance art; Allison Kettering in the field of Dutch Baroque art; and young, up-and-coming scholars like Michael Yonan, Krista Thompson, and Graham Boettcher, the William Cary Hulsey Curator of American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, have been keynote speakers.