History of Art PhD student, Stefano Colombo, has been awarded a Royal Historical Society conference travel grant. The grant will allow him to deliver a presentation at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Berlin, 26-28 March 2015. The title of the presentation is “The Commemorative Monument of the Fini Family in San Moisè: Strategies of Self-Promotion and Social Affirmation in Seventeenth-Century Venice".

The Henry Moore Institute Library in Leeds is currently showing the display Henry Hugh Armstead's Royal Academy: A Sculptor's Career in Late Victorian Britain which has been curated by Desiree de Chair, PhD candidate in the History of Art department. The display is on until 14 December 2014.

Kayoko Ichikawa formed part of a group at the Digital Humanities Fall School at Ca’ Foscari, our partner university in Venice.

Department of History of Art former PhD student Nora Gietz will deliver a special legacy lecture in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo and the 50th anniversary of St.John's International School, Waterloo. She will speak about her doctoral thesis: The Effects of Napoleonic Rule on Venice's Artistic Patrimony.

Nora completed her PhD in summer 2013 and was examined in September 2013.

Thursday October 2 at 19:30, reception from 18:30, Theater of the Performing Arts Center, St. John's International School, Waterloo, Belgium.

Free admission, donations to the scholarship fund gratefully accepted.

Three Warwick graduates have been back to work on the Pontigny project with Dr Jenny Alexander of the History of Art department and Prof. Terryl Kinder of Pontigny. Rosie Harris Adamson and Lucy Henderson were awarded scholarships for the URSS Pontigny Project in 2011 and they were joined by Agatha Gomolka, a MA student from the department, who is now working on her PhD. Another Pontigny Project team member, Roo Alexander-Jones, the team's film maker, who graduated from Oxford Brookes university last summer, completed the team.

The team was trying out some new equipment derived from the optics used by bird-watchers and for the first time it was possible to find and record the marks made by the stonemasons who built the vaults high up in the building. The results are now being processed, but it is already clear that the team's work has provided vital new evidence about the relationship between the high vaults and the main stucture of the building, and this will resolve a long-standing question about Cistercian builders and their place in early-Gothic architecture.

PhD student Giorgia Mancini has published in The Burlington Magazine.