Faculty Profile
Nancy L Wicker
Professor of Art History
Phone Number: (662)915-1293
Email: nwicker@olemiss.edu
http://art.olemiss.edu/2012/07/09/dr-nancy-wicker/
Key Words: Medieval Art History and Archaeology
Research Description: Wicker's interdisciplinary research focuses on the reception of Roman art in Scandinavia during the Early Medieval Period as well as the development of animal-style art into the Viking Age. She is interested in how Late Roman medallions inspired stamped gold pendants known as bracteates, which were worn by elite women across northern Europe. She participated in the Getty Foundation Seminar, "The Arts of Rome's Provinces" and has collaborated with a contemporary goldsmith to reconstruct early medieval jewelry techniques. In addition to her research on bracteates, she has published on gender in archaeology, female infanticide during the Viking Age, Germanic animal-style art, and runic literacy. She has co-edited three books on gender and archaeology, including Situating Gender in European Archaeologies (Budapest: Archaeolingua, 2010). She is co-director of an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to develop Project Andvari, an online integrated access to dispersed digital collections of early medieval artifacts. The project is continuing with collaborators at the University of Virginia, The Catholic University of America, and the University of Maryland, as well as international colleagues at the British Museum in London, U.K., Norwich Castle Museum, U.K., and the National History Museum in Stockholm, Sweden.
Honors Theses:
Murry, Rowan (2021) Greco-Roman Paganism and Women Leaders: The Foundation of Early Christian Art (full text)
Boyles, William (2015) Redefining the Insular Tradition: Illuminated Manuscripts of the Seventh through Ninth Centuries. (full text)
Hodges, Katherine Gresham (2012) "Technical and Stylistic Changes in Jewelry from the Time of Theophilus to the Time of Cellini" (full text)
Available Research Projects:
Project Andvari: A Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe
Project Description: Project Andvari is an international collaborative project designed to create a digital portal that will provide integrated access to collections of northern European art and artifacts of the fourth through twelfth centuries. The project title Andvari evokes many features of this new research tool. Andvari (Old Norse "the careful one") is the name of a dwarf in Norse mythology, where dwarves are associated with arts and crafts. Andvari is the collector of a great treasure and a shape-shifter. Thus his character echoes the idea of a digital portal functioning as an aggregator and its utility in searching artistic elements transformed across media, regions, and cultures. Despite the wealth of the surviving visual culture from early medieval Scandinavia and neighboring areas, primary materials are often difficult to access, scattered in specialized, national collections. Researchers working on artifacts in one medium are often unaware of parallels in another and use different terminology to describe similar elements. Recently, several collections of material restricted by medium, object type, or location have been made available through online catalogues, but these subsets have remained unconnected. Furthermore, the search functions of existing databases are often limiting since they pre-structure material in conventional categories dictated by scholarly traditions. In response to these challenges, Project Andvari will facilitate interdisciplinary research in the northern periphery of medieval Europe, allowing users to study visual culture across media and beyond traditional geographical and disciplinary boundaries.
Desired Student Qualifications: Ability to read Old English and/or German would be a plus. Ability to do meticulous data entry. Ability to make independent decisions about data coding according to established content rules.
Project Timeline: We have received funding for nine months from January through September 2022 and may be able to involve students in data entry and iconographic decision making.
Duties of Student Researcher: Duties yet to be determined.
Last Updated on 2021-10-30 18:54:49