The Department is pleased to announce that on May 27, Caylen Heckel successfully defended her doctoral thesis titled Masculinity and Exile: The Art of Benvenuto Cellini (Professor Una D’Elia, Supervisor).

With the support of an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship, Shaelagh Cull visited the British Library in January to do her M.A. (Art History) research on the history of art, craft and trade in the James Bay region of Northern Ontario. Recently, she shared some of her findings in the British Library’s special Summer Scholars blog series, which highlights research supported by Eccles Centre awards recipients working with Caribbean, Canadian, and US collections at the British Library.  

Since 2012, the website Closer to Van Eyck—coordinated by Queen’s Professor Ron Spronk—has made it possible for anyone to zoom in on the intricate, breathtaking details of one of the most celebrated works of art in the world: the Ghent Altarpiece. An 800% increase in visitors since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic indicates that Closer to Van Eyck is being regarded as a welcome alternative for traditional museum visits, reaching more than 256,000 people in 2020 so far.

MA candidates Maddison Andrews and Julia Ranney have created and published cultural itineraries that also work as virtual tours:

Lights, Camera, Action: Theatricality and Renaissance Sculpture

Heroines, Saints & Prostitutes of Renaissance Florence & Fiesole

Congratulations to Art History Professor Una D’Elia for winning the 2020 Principal’s Promoting Student Inquiry Teaching Award. This university-wide award recognizes innovative instructional design which enables active student engagement in learning. Professor D’Elia was awarded this distinction for her inspiring fall 2019 seminar, ARTH 485 A Social and Material History of Italian Renaissance Sculpture/ARTH 840 Studies in Italian Renaissance Art: A Material History of Italian Renaissance Sculpture.

We are pleased to announce that our current graduate student, Nuard Tadevosyan (MA, Art History), won the 2020 Mavis Batey Essay Prize offered through the Gardens Trust (UK). The annual prize is awarded to any student (or recent graduate), worldwide, registered at an institution of higher education. Tadevosyan’s essay, “Della Robbia Green: From Sublime to Sinister" looked at the use of the colour green in Della Robbia’s ceramics workshop in Renaissance Florence, drawing links to the representation of natural imagery and the symbolism of colour.

Check out this website promoting the exhibit curated by Stephanie S. Dickey, PhD, one of our Professors of Art History.

Professor Matthew Reeve has published a new book Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole. Learn more about the book.

PhD students Béatrice Cloutier-Trépanier, Genevieve Flavelle, Andrea Morgan and Isabel Luce will all present their research at the 2020 Universities Art Association of Canada Conference, October 15-17, 2020. A full schedule is available.