The Department of History of Art & Architecture is pleased to announce graduate student Emma Roberts and undergraduate student Tadas Trakumas as the inaugural winners of the Terry Smith Prize for Research on Modern and/or Contemporary Art, Architecture, and Visual Culture. Endowed by Professor Emeritus Terry Smith upon his retirement in 2022, the Terry Smith Prize recognizes outstanding student scholarship completed as part of coursework.
Developed in seminars with A W Mellon Professor Huey Copeland and Associate Professor Alex J. Taylor, Roberts’ award-winning paper “Smoothing Off the Rough Corners: In the Company of Men (1969) and the Interracial Encounter” examines how the film’s circulation, beyond the original workplace context, was mobilized and interpreted as a means of managing racial difference.
Trakumas, mentored by Associate Professor Drew Armstrong as part of a Humanities Center Fellowship, used archival materials, newspapers, and interviews to examine the history of megastructures and the relationships and tension between the University of Pittsburgh and the Oakland community during the planning and construction of the Forbes Quadrangle (now the William W. Posvar Hall).
Terry Smith is Professor Emeritus in the History of Art & Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught from 2002 until his retirement in 2022. He is also Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge (2025-26). Professor Smith is recognized for his wide ranging contributions to modern art, Australian indigenous art, and curatorial theory, which are reflected in his books Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (1993); The Twentieth Century: Modernism and Aboriginality (2002); Talking Contemporary Curating (2015). In recent decades he has led the discourse on “contemporaneity” and art; borne out by titles such as What is Contemporary Art? (2009) and Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art (2019). A dedicated classroom teacher, seminar leader, and mentor to generations of graduate students, Prof. Smith received the Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award from the College Art Association in 2022.