Art History Associate Professor Awarded Fellowship from CASVA

Dr. Lynn Jones, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, has been awarded 1 of 12 Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellowships from the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts (CASVA). The Fellowship includes housing in D.C and a $7,000 stipend; Dr. Jones will be in residence June-August 2016. This Fellowship is ranked as ‘prestigious’ in FSU’s Extraordinary Accomplishments Program. Dr. Jones will spend her time at CASVA writing her third book, Visions of Death and Resurrection in the Rock-Cut Churches of Cappadocia (contracted with Ashgate Publishing). Before taking up residency at CASVA, she will be conducting final research in central Turkey, aided by a Council on Research & Creativity 2015-2016 Small Grant Award in the amount of $3,000.

Dr. Jones (Ph.D., University of Illinois) specializes in the medieval East: the Empire of Byzantium, the kingdoms of Armenia and Georgia and the Islamic Caliphates. Issues of medieval identity have informed much of her work. Her first book, Between Islam and Byzantium: Aght`amar and the Visual Construction of Medieval Armenian Rulership (2007), covers a period (885-1100 CE) when Armenia was a vassal state of the Abbasid Caliphate and a buffer zone between the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate. In it she demonstrates that the Armenian visual expression of power was modeled on the Abbasid paradigm, while the visual expression of Armenian piety reflected a specifically Armenian Orthodox view, eschewing all links with Byzantium and Greek Orthdoxy.

She is editor of, and contributed to, a festschrift, Byzantine Images and Their Afterlives: Essays in Honor of Annmarie Weyl Carr (Ashgate Publishing, 2014). The concepts linking the 12 papers written for the volume include the examination of form and meaning, the relationship between original and copy and reception and cultural identity in medieval art and architecture.