Meredith Bagby Fettes, a graduate student in the UALR Department of Art, has been selected as a 2013 recipient of the Love of Learning grant.

Phi Kappa Phi, the collegiate honor society, awards the $500 professional and career development grant to only 147 students each year. This year’s applicant pool exceeded 1,400 entrants.

Fettes will use the award money to travel to the 2013 Southeastern College Art Conference at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, from Oct. 30 to Nov. 2. She will chair a session titled “‘Avenge Me!’: Expressions of Vengeance and Retribution” at the conference.

“The idea for the session arose while my husband was working on a research project involving Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Henry V and I was re-reading Homer’s Iliad,” Fettes explained.

“While immersed in these stories of the extremes of human anger, I considered the need for a session whose participants explore unfavorable emotions such as jealousy, rage, and revenge as depicted in art,” she said.

Fettes said she will have a full session of artists and art historians ready to share their research on the topic. Papers range from ancient Roman/Dacian architecture and Egyptian tomb defacing to images of the Crusades and landscapes whose subtle alterations from tradition subvert the French academic tradition.

Fettes teaches art and painting at Maumelle High School, and she plans to pursue a Ph.D. in art history following completion of her thesis and graduation from UALR.

Her area of specialization is ancient Maya art. Her thesis comprises the first detailed iconographic analysis of a tomb façade found at the Maya site of Ek’ Balam in Yucatán, Mexico. Fettes’ research has taken her to the Yucatán twice, with a third trip for on-site fieldwork planned for later this year.