ROCK HILL, SOUTH CAROLINA -- Martha Grace Whiteman, a senior art history major in Winthrop University’s Department of Fine Arts, was selected to present her research in the Undergraduate Research Poster Session at the 2020 College Art Association Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois.
The CAA Annual Conference is the largest gathering of visual arts professionals that celebrates and advances the accomplishments of the art community. Whiteman’s poster presentation, “Creating a Cult: How the Canterbury Monks Capitalized on the Myth of Thomas Becket in Popular Culture, Visual and Textual Imagery, and Branding,” reveals how the monks of Canterbury established a cult culture around archbishop Thomas Becket following his assassination inside Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 at the hands of King Henry II’s knights.
Whiteman began her research on Canterbury Cathedral and the cult of Thomas Becket in Assistant Professor of Fine Arts Kyle Sweeney’s art history seminar on the visual culture of medieval pilgrimage. “Martha’s presentation is thought-provoking, nuanced and highly sophisticated in both its theoretical framework and the originality of its argument,” Sweeney said.
Whiteman received a prestigious Trimmer Travel Award from the national Council on Undergraduate Research in recognition of the outstanding quality of her scholarship. She has also earned the Art History PALS Award and a grant for undergraduate research travel from Winthrop.
For more information, contact Whitney Hough, director of communications and community engagement, in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, at 803/323-2399 or houghw@winthrop.edu.
