Two of our PhD students have received prestigious awards

Our PhD student Benedetta Panisson has been selected to participate in the Italian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale with her project Queer Sea Marriage. Benedetta Panisson is currently completing her PhD thesis on nineteenth- and twentieth-century photography and sexual exorbitance in island environments. She is supervised by Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián and Marc Schachter.

Our PhD student Stephanie Bernard has been awarded the 2025 Juan Facundo Riaño Essay Medal for the best essay by an emerging scholar writing on a theme of Spanish art history. She submitted an article titled 'A Picture for the King: Identity and Patronage in Juan Sánchez Cotán’s Our Lady of the Rosary’. Stephanie is supervised by Claudia Hopkins and Jean Andrews.

This is the second time in a few years where this prize is awarded to a Durham University languages research student. In 2022, PhD student Patrizia Manzano won the prize. This prize is awarded by ARTES (Iberian and Latin America Visual Culture Group).