Triple Grants for Art History Grad
In the past month, graduate student Brad Hostetler has received three fellowships for his dissertation research on Byzantine reliquaries in Europe. Brad received the FSU International Dissertation Semester Research Fellowship, which will allow him to conduct research at the Institut für Byzantinistik und Neogräzistik at the Universität Wien in the spring semester of 2014. From Vienna, he will travel to specific archives and libraries in Paris, Rome, and Cologne where he will consult archival descriptions and drawings of Byzantine reliquaries that no longer survive.
Brad also received the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Grant for Independent Research on Venetian History and Culture. This award will fund research in Venice at the Biblioteca Marciana and at the Treasury of San Marco–the single largest repository of Byzantine reliquaries. And he received a scholarship from the A.G. Leventis Foundation to attend the 2013 Medieval Greek Summer Session at the Gennadius Library of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in July. The competitive Greek summer program is offered biennially and limited to only 12 doctoral students.
Brad’s dissertation, “Text as Iconography: Middle Byzantine Reliquaries with Dedicatory Inscriptions,” examines how inscribed words–through their rhetoric and placement–integrate with the reliquaries’ visual programs and convey personalized messages for the patrons.