Sheila Scoville
OSGF
Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session III
Sheila Scoville is a doctoral candidate in art history at Florida State University, where she studies Mesoamerican ecological knowledge in visual and material culture from the pre-Hispanic and colonial eras to the present day. Sheila holds an MA in Art History from the University of Houston and a BA in English from Rollins College. She was a 2024–25 Peter Buck Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Her doctoral research on colonial Mexican illustrations of the mutualism between people and agave plants has also been supported by residencies at the Huntington and John Carter Brown libraries and Oak Spring Garden Foundation. In 2022, she was a Plant Humanities fellow at Dumbarton Oaks.
Sheila is the doctoral recipient of the 2022 I. N. Winbury Essay Award, the 2021 Emerging Scholars in Object-Based Learning Award from the MFA, Houston, and a 2021 Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship. Past and future meetings featuring her as a presenter include College Art Association, American Society for Ethnohistory, Modern Language Association, Social Theory, Politics & The Arts, Midwest Art History Society, Association for the Study of Food and Society, the Materializing Race initiative, and symposia at University of California, Santa Barbara, and FSU. Her writing has been published by Quaderni Culturali IILA, Against the Canon Art, Feminism(s) and Activisms XVIII to XXI Centuries, and the Plant Humanities Lab. As a master’s student, she was the assistant art editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts.