Graduate Prizes
The Laurinda Dixon Prize for the best graduate student symposium paper is awarded annually and carries a cash prize. The award is named for Laurinda S. Dixon, Professor Emerita of Art History at Syracuse University. Professor Dixon taught in the Department of Art and Music Histories for thirty-five years and served many of them as Director of Graduate Studies.
Professor Dixon is an innovative scholar whose work considers the intersection of early modern art and science, particularly alchemy, herbalism, medicine, astrology, and music. She is the author of many articles, book chapters, and ten books, including The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca. 1500-1700 (2013), Bosch (2003), and Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art and Medicine(1995). Professor Dixon continues to publish and lecture widely and has expanded her interest into the nineteenth century.
As a dedicated teacher, students at Syracuse University benefited from Professor Dixon's scholarly rigor and high expectations. She designed the Symposium Paper process for our master's program and believed deeply in engaging students through conversation and humor. Her teaching excellence was recognized when she was named "William P. Tolley Distinguished Teaching Professor" (2003 to 2005), the most prestigious teaching honor awarded by the university.
Phantom Indians on Unceded Land: Cyrus Dallin’s A Signal of Peace and Chicago’s Contested Monuments
Edward W. Redfield: Landscape Painting, Water, and Environmentalism in the Delaware River Valley
2020 Co-Recipients
Julia Jessen
Making History, Justifying Conquest: Images of First Contact in American Book Company Textbooks
Mónica Quiñones-Rivera
Queen Elizabeth I: Vestal Virgin of England
Twisted Tales: Kiki Smith and Feminist Revisions of the Beastly
Performative Spaces: Subject and Spectator in Walker Evans's Message from the Interior (1966)
The Holt Prize for the best graduate student symposium paper was awarded annually until 2017 and carried a cash prize. The award was named for Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (1905-1987), who is known for her important series of books, Sources and Documents in the History of Art. She was among the first art historians to investigate art in relationship to documentary evidence, in the process re-shaping the very way that art history is studied. Thanks to Holt's pioneering methodology, we now interpret works of art in the context of history and ideas. Elizabeth Holt was a great friend of the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University. She received an honorary doctorate from S.U., and Syracuse University Press published a book of essays, The Documented Image: Visions in Art History, in her honor in 1987. The Holt Prize has been supplanted by the Laurinda Dixon Prize.
Recipients
2017 Irene Garcia
Painting Disenchantment? The Baquiné and the Shadow of Colonialism in Francisco Oller's "The Wake" (1893)
2016 Kathleen Brousseau
Eero Saarinen's Dulles International Airport: A Jet-Age Monument to the Cold War
2015 Stefanie Chappell
The Power of Place: Amos Doolittle's Engravings of the Battle of Lexington and Concord
2013 Alysson Biermaier
Panel of Plague: Mantegna's Saint Sebastian
2011 Heather Paroubek
Karl Blechen's Ruins of a Gothic Church
2010 Sarah Grzymala
Frans Snyders: Animals as Food to Consume and Creatures to Respect
2009 Caitlin Sweeney
Matteo di Giovanni's Massacre of the Innocents and Civic Maternity in Quattrocento Siena
2008 Darin J. Stine
Re-identifying a Sheet of Michelangelo's Marble Blocks
2007 Carol Huston
Winged Machines: Airplane Imagery in Eduardo Paolozzi's Collages and Prints, 1946-1983
2005 Stephanie Stockbridge
Gassed: An Artist's Vision of Blindness
2003 Stephanie Kuhlman
E de K and the Modern Woman Discourse
2002 Emily Gaines Buchler
Artemisia Gentileschi's Three Paintings of Cleopatra: A Conventional Response to an Age-Old Theme
2001 Eric Ramirez-Weaver
Victorious Times: the Triumph over Vice in a Zodiac from the Utrecht Psalter
2000 Rahel Elmer Reger
19th-Century Realism and its 17th-Century Dutch Influences
1996 Betsy Purvis
Niccolo Dell'Arca's Lamentation and the Confraternity of Santa Maria della Vita
1995 M. Elen Deming
Frank Lloyd Wright, Japonism, and the Modern Landscape: America in Search of the Universal Aesthetic of Nature
1994 Maureen Quigley
The Vespucci Bacchanals: Be a Busy Bee – or Get Stung
1993 Suzy Spencer
Dulle Griet
1992 Lawrie H. Merz
Lady Digby as Prudence by Anthony Van Dyck as a Reflection of Court Culture of Seventeenth-Century England
1991 John Melczer
The Man from Montreuil
1990 Genine Plunkett
Personal Sources for Durer's Contemplative Scholar/Saint: The Late Images of St. Jerome
1989 Penni Billett
Her Soul Selects Her Own Society: The Secrets of Lady Butler
1988 Erick Wilberding
Liturgical Gestures in the Portinari Altarpiece
1987 Kirsty Mills
The Effect of the Sack of Rome on the Art of Rosso Fiorentino
1986 Matthew Cohen
Giotto's Skyscraper: The Innovative Use of the Gothic Style in Giotto's Original Design for the Campanile of Florence
n.b. prior to 2015, the Holt Prize was awarded to the best graduate paper of the previous calendar year; it is now awarded to the best graduate symposium paper presented each spring