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Professor Evie Terrono |
4/24/12
Randolph-Macon College
Art History Professor Evie Terrono was recently awarded a Mednick Fellowship for her project titled “‘Great Generals and Christian Soldiers:’ Art and Politics in Laura Gardin Fraser’s Monument of Lee and Jackson.” The Mednick Memorial Fund is awarded by the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges to “encourage the professional development of college teachers and improve their academic competence through fellowships for research and advanced study.”
The award will allow Terrono to do extensive research at the Fraser archives at the Donald C. & Elizabeth M. Dickinson Research Center at National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Additionally, Terrono will research the Fraser archives in the collection of Syracuse University.
“The monumental equestrian statue of Jackson and Lee, at Wyman Park, is one of three confederate monuments in the City of Baltimore, but the only one that was funded entirely by a private bequest in the will of prominent Baltimore banker J. Henry Ferguson, who wished it to be an everlasting and visible manifestation of his life-long admiration of the generals,” says Terrono. “Conceived in the 1930s, the monument was not unveiled until May 1, 1948, at which time officials remarked on its didactic potential for younger generations and proclaimed the two generals as the ‘glorious heritage of all freedom- loving people,’ while the monument was deemed as a most effective antidote to the rising communist threat.”
In her research, Terrono will seek to understand the complexities of the commission of the monument and the multifaceted political underpinnings that defined its reception at mid-century and in subsequent decades. This is part of a larger study on Baltimore’s Civil War monuments.
This project reflects Terrono’s broad interest in the memory and commemoration of the American Civil War, its actors and its heroes and the sites of memory in which contested remembrances of the conflict continue to be re-enacted. She is currently at work on a book-length study of the Politics of the Art Exhibitions of the Civil War Sanitary Fairs, the most important and highly politicized exhibitions that took place in Union States during the Civil War.
“My research always informs my teaching and aspects of the research on this project will enhance the content of my upcoming
First-Year Experience course with Professor Brian Turner (
political science),” says Terrono. “The course, Civil War to Civil Rights, is tied to the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 50th anniversary of a seminal moment in the Civil Rights Movement—Dr. Martin Luther King’s 'I Have a Dream' speech during the March on Washington. Students will study the meaning given to these historic events using the methods of art history and political science."
Terrono joined the R-MC faculty in 1990. She earned a bachelor’s degree from University of Crete (Greece), a master’s of art from Queen’s College, and a master’s of philosophy and Ph.D. from The Graduate School and University Center, The City University of New York.