A&A NEWS

Maria Alessia Rossi Presents at 25th International Congress of Byzantine Studies in Vienna, Austria

By Maria Alessia Rossi, Art History Specialist, Index of Medieval Art

I was excited to participate in the 25th International Congress of Byzantine Studies (Vienna, 24–29 August 2026). The event brought together more than 1,500 participants from over 50 countries. As cleverly put during the closing remarks of the Congress: “For one week, Vienna was Byzantium!"

I presented in the thematic session “Cultural Exchanges at the Time of the Palaiologoi: Beyond the Borders of Byzantium” on Friday, August 28 with a paper titled “The Mobility of Form: Byzantium and Serbia in the Palaiologan Period.” The session was very successful and was followed by a lively discussion.

Princeton was especially well represented as Teresa Shawcross (History) was also speaking in this session with a paper titled: “Between Us and You There Is a Great Gulf: Economic Disparity and Social Inequality in the Writings of Theodore Palaiologos, Marquess of Montferrat."

I also organized the session “Discovering Byzantium through Athonite Collections on the Princeton Campus” on Saturday, August 29. This was an opportunity to showcase the brilliant work that scholars have accomplished through the Connecting Histories. The Princeton and Mount Athos Legacy project, co-organized with Julia Gearhart. Many new ideas developed in the aftermath of the session, once again showcasing the value of the Mount Athos collections on the Princeton campus. The conversation will continue at the Symposium "Athonite Collections and Their Challenges: Scholarly Access and Digital Surrogates" to be held at Princeton September 25-26, 2026. 

Graduate Student Julia Curl Organizes MoMA Film Screening and Teaches Connected VIS Course

Julia Curl (second from right) with 2025-26 Marron Research Consortium (MRC) Fellows Corey Loftus (IFA/MRC Fellow in Cisneros Institute), Forrest Pelsue (Graduate Center/MRC Fellow in Architecture and Design), Ekalan Hou (Yale/MRC Fellow in Photography), and Sarah Bevin (Columbia/MRC Fellow in Architecture and Design) (Photo courtesy of MoMA)

A&A graduate student Julia Curl, who was a 2025-26 Marron Research Consortium (MRC) Fellow, is co-organizing the MoMA screening series "Long Live the Underground! Celebrating Six Decades of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Millennium Film Workshop", which runs from September 23 through October 8, 2026. Curl will introduce the screenings “Roots of the Underground” on September 24 and “The Material is the Message” on September 27 and 30, 2026.

Curl collaborated with Director of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (FMC) Matt McKinzie, Director of Millennium Joe Wakeman, and FMC's board president, David Schwartz, who each chose a theme related to their own expertise. “For me, that was ‘Roots of the NY Underground,’ since my dissertation is on early American experimental cinema, and ‘The Material is the Message,’ which highlights experimental filmmaking techniques.”

This project also helped inform the course Curl is co-teaching this semester with Visual Arts Program Professor Christopher Harris: VIS 264 “Making Analog Films Without Cameras.” “'The Material is the Message' screening is essentially a program-length distillation of what Chris Harris and I are co-teaching this fall, so I had the luck of being able to conduct research for both at the same time," she said. “It focuses on the many, many ways that one can make a beautiful celluloid film without a camera: painting, drawing, scratching, collaging, destroying.” Curl is planning a field trip to combine visiting the Film-Makers’ Cooperative’s office and archive with the screening, to give them "an opportunity for them to really connect with the vibrant ecosystem around this work in NYC today," she said.

Julia Curl Screening Event and Course

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Reading Group on Broader Understanding of Photography

Graduate student Maya Hayda and Molly Brandt (School of Architecture) are co-organizers of the IHUM reading group "Converging and Diverging: Recalibrating the Photographic," continued from last year.

The question of what photography is has been endemic to the medium since its nascent moments. This reading group aims to be an interdisciplinary forum for considering the implications of an expanded understanding of photography. How do we go beyond binaries of photo history/theory discourses such as documentary versus art, analog versus digital, to understand photography as an expanded, territorializing operation? What forms of alternative or experimental techniques are contemporary photographers employing to recalibrate the boundaries of the medium? What are methodologies that we can use to engage with practices that embrace more affective and embodied modes of analysis that go beyond vision?

Fall Schedule:

Session 1: Origins & Invention

Wed., Sep. 16, 5–7 pm, School of Architecture, Room N104

Session 2: Aperture & The Family of Man 

Wed., Oct. 28, 5–7 pm, School of Architecture, Room N104

Fieldtrip

Sat., Oct. 31 (TBC)

Trip to New York to visit Aperture Loves New York,

inaugural exhibition at the new Aperture Foundation location

Session 3: Warring Visions 

Wed., Nov. 11, 5–7 pm, School of Architecture, Room N104

Converging and Diverging details

The Index of Medieval Art Database Training Session

Musician playing bagpipe, manuscript miniature, Cantigas de Santa María, Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial, MS B.I.2, fol. 313v (Seville, 1280-1300). Photo: RBME. Patrimonio Nacional.

This online session, led by Index specialists Maria Alessia Rossi and Jessica Savage, will demonstrate how the database can be used with advanced search options, filters, and browse tools to locate works of medieval art.

There will be a Q&A at the end of the session, so please bring any questions you might have about your research!

Mon., Oct. 5, 10–11 am

Via Zoom

Index Database Training Session

PUBLICATIONS

New Release: Power, Patronage, and Production Edited by Beatrice Kitzinger with A&A Contributors

Edited by Jeffrey Hamburger, Beatrice Kitzinger, and Joshua O’Driscoll, Power, Patronage, and Production: Book Arts from Central Europe (ca. 800-1500) in American Collections (Brepols, 2026) includes articles by Art History Specialist in the Index of Medieval Art Jessica Savage and graduate student Francesca Pistone. The Index of Medieval Art hosted the related conference Index Cosponsored Conference: “Power, Patronage, and Production,” on January 13-15, 2022.

Abstract: The arts of the book from central Europe often provide a mirror both for imperial aspirations as well as for the complex pluralities of societies on the ground. The essays in this collection explore material written in Czech, German, Hebrew, and Latin, made for both religious and non-religious contexts in the ninth, twelfth, and fifteenth centuries, highlighting the range and depth of the Central European corpus as well as how integral such material has been to the formation of medieval holdings in America.

ALUMNI NEWS

Amy Freund ’94 Authors Noble Beasts: Hunters and Hunted in Eighteenth-Century French Art

Amy Freund ’94 published her second book, Noble Beasts: Hunters and Hunted in Eighteenth-Century French Art, with Yale University Press in January 2026. Her book investigates how visual fantasies of violence, animality, and political agency offered an alternative image of masculinity during the Enlightenment. Hunting art was embraced with enthusiasm by both artists and patrons, and inspired artworks in every genre and medium in 18th-century France. Amy’s book revises received notions of 18th-century French art and culture, examining a visual culture of animality, violence, and death—a Rococo of guns and dogs. It also draws on the critical frameworks of human-animal studies and on Enlightenment philosophical debates to explore how and why hunting art’s aesthetic and political claims blurred the lines between human and animal. Amy is associate professor and the Kleinheinz Family Endowed Chair in Art History at Southern Methodist University.