Vasari Lecture

Art history students present their own original research

(reconceptualized at the Vasari Symposium, beginning in 2021)

Up until 2019, every year, one art history major was selected to give the annual Vasari Lecture, presenting research pursued in the Art History Senior Seminar. We are proud of the work that our students have done, and we encourage you to take a look at the titles of the Vasari Lectures listed below.

In 2021 through 2025, we developed an alternate structure, where several students presented their original research at an event re-branded as the Vasari Symposium. Please see the details for those presentations below.

Named for the 16th-century Italian artist/scholar Giorgio Vasari, whose publications The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550; 1568) are among the most influential examples of art historical writing, the Vasari Lectures and Symposia are where the intellectual diversity of Fordham's art history program comes to life. 

2025

  • Gracie Torrence, “The Virgin of Valvanera: From Conversion to Subversion”
  • Magnolia Finn, “She Wore the Pants: Manet’s Espada and demi-monde, circa 1860”
  • Justin Apice, “Entartung in Amerika: Painting and Jewish-American Identity in the Wake of the Holocaust” [link to related digital exhibition
  • Amelia Ferguson, “The Armor of Imperialism: Henry Moore, Helmet Heads, and the Looting of the Benin Bronzes”

2024

  • Sarah McGhee, “Seeking an Iconography of the Kenedy Assassination in the Work of Andy Warhol”
  • Sloan Mulloy, “Alexander McQueen’s Narrative of Jacobite Fall and Highland Identity”
  • Gabrielle Gowans, “Palimpsest and Masquerade: Homely Unhomeliness in Tommy Kha’s Constellations XVIII”

2023

  • Maia Perry, “Restitution in the Wake of Diaspora”
  • Angelina Diamante, “The Pagan Fantasy: Bernini’s Bacchanal and Escapism in the Early Baroque”
  • Tiziana Capizzi, “Fashioning the Other: ‘Costumes de Femme à Panama’ and the Construction Of Race in Nineteenth-Century Panama”

2022

  • Kassandra Ibrahim, “The Forgotten Narrative: Women on a Sixth-Century Pyx”
  • Matthew Biedermann, “Between Stage and Reality: Black Pages in Veronese’s Feast in the House of Levi”
  • Gillian Kwok, “Utopian Myth: Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919), by El Lissitzky”

2021

  • Bethany Greenho, “The Urn in the Hallway: Evaluating a Roman Antiquity”
  • Marian Winget, “Cihuateotl at the Crossroads: Unraveling a Colonial Narrative in the Museum”
  • Lily Harris, “White Feminism and the Museum: A Critique of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party”