Jacqueline E. Jung, associate professor in the department of the history of art at Yale University, will present the keynote address at the 26th Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History at UA on February 26, 2021. Prof. Jung’s talk from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. is titled, “Images of Africans in Gothic Art: Race and Representation in Thirteenth-Century Northern Europe.” The symposium, a shared production of the departments of art and art history at The University of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, will take place this year via Zoom. The full schedule of graduate research papers is available here.
Jung is a scholar of the art and architecture of the medieval West. Her first book, The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200-1400 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013) won several top awards including the John Nicholas Brown Prize by the Medieval Academy of America, and the PROSE Award for Art History and Criticism by the Association of American Publishers. Her new book, Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture, published in July by Yale University Press, explores how medieval sculptors used a form of bodily poetics—involving facial expression, gesture, stance, and torsion—to create meanings beyond conventional iconography and to subtly manipulate spatial dynamics, forging connections between the sculptures and beholders. Eloquent Bodies demonstrates how viewers confronted and, in turn, were addressed by sculptures at major cathedrals in France and Germany, from Chartres and Reims to Strasbourg, Bamberg, Magdeburg, and Naumburg.
The 26th Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History is generously supported by The University of Alabama Department of Art & Art History, the College of Arts & Sciences, The Graduate School, and Harrison Galleries LLC. We invite you to use the hashtag #UAUABArtHistoryGradSymposium when posting on social media about the symposium.
The Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History, organized by the departments of art and art history at The University of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, began in 1995 and alternates campuses each year. The symposium provides MA students an opportunity to present research, critically engage with one another, and hear and be heard by eminent scholars working in the field of art history. The symposium is part of UA’s and UAB’s Joint Program for the MA in Art History. For more information, go here.
For more information about The University of Alabama’s programs in art history and studio art, visit our Degree Programs page.