Architectural Historian Wins Grant

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Neon signs and rococco splendor celebrate today's gambling palaces, but a much more elegant civic form, the loggia, advertised gaming during the middle ages. Professor Kim Sexton, who teaches architectural history at the University of Arkansas School of Architecture, will spend this spring in Venice wrapping up research for her forthcoming book "Loggia Culture and the Practice of Space in Italy, 1200 - 1600."

Sexton has been awarded a postdoctoral grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation that will support her research on the loggia, a Roman architectural form that reemerged in the 13th century as a forum for gambling, usury, and gaming. With its series of archways or colonnades, the loggia framed and legitimized mercantile activities frowned upon by the Church. The loggia also provided a public, semi-outdoor space for everything from socializing to sentencing criminals, functioning something like a medieval television in broadcasting popular culture.

"The loggia remains an ideal architectural form through which to investigate issues of power, space, wealth, class, ethnicity and even theology," Sexton said. "It's also an exceptional lens through which to assess the transformation of late medieval Italy into the Renaissance."

School of Architecture Dean Jeff Shannon affirmed the value of Sexton's research and teaching.

"Kim’s impending semester in Venice is a double-edged sword for us. On the one hand, it’s great (and deserved) that her work is being recognized as significant by outside reviewers; on the other hand, that recognition means, for the semester at least, that our students will miss her engaging history courses."

Sexton earned her bachelor's degree with honors in French and German from Binghamton State University of New York, and subsequently studied art history at Yale, where she earned two master's degrees and a doctorate specializing in Italian Renaissance architecture. She has devoted more than fifteen years of study to the rebirth and death of the loggia, conducting research in Florence, Rome, Venice and Bergamo. She taught at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville before coming to the University of Arkansas in 1999.

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