Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Monday, April 16, 2018 in Events, HART, Lectures, News, Student/Alumni, Vanderbilt University, VRC.

Our department proudly recognizes two students who presented papers from their History of Art classes in the annual Undergraduate Writing Symposium on March 25 at the John Siegenthaler Center on the Peabody campus. Sophomore Matthew Shorten and senior Samantha Smith participated in a panel entitled “Objects of Culture and History,” chaired by Betsey Robinson, associate professor of history of art.

Shorten presented “Japanese Tea, Ceremony, and Ceramics: Agents of Healing, Transformation, and Dynamic Cultural Symbolism,” a paper he originally wrote in the course, Healing and Art in East Asia, taught by Tracy Miller, associate professor of history of art. In his paper he examined the connection between tea as a health beverage and aesthetic preoccupation in early modern Japan and the development of the nation’s collective culture.

Smith presented “Romanticizing Ruin: The Imaginative Landscapes of Hubert Robert,” a paper assessing the career of the eighteenth-century artist Hubert Robert, demonstrating how he built upon the tradition of capriccio artists Giovanni Paolo Panini and Giovanni Battista Piranesi to create powerful works in response to the urbanization of Paris, and then the French Revolution. Smith became fascinated with the work of Robert while studying him at Saint Andrew’s University in Scotland, and followed up with a paper in Robinson’s seminar, Ancient Landscapes.

In its tenth year as a major undergraduate research event, the Undergraduate Writing Symposium is a forum for excellent undergraduate writing of all kinds. In addition to essays, the symposium features the great diversity of research and writing projects produced by students in all four undergraduate schools, and  competition is intense for participation in the ten panels.  Congratulations to our two HART students for their scholarly contributions!