Several of the Art History PhD students and candidates have been busy writing articles, participating in fellowships, presenting papers, and more.
Erin Giffin (PhD candidate) completed her Kress Fellowship at the Medici Archives in Florence at the end of June. She “then traveled through Lombardy, Piedmont, and Emilia-Romagna looking at renaissance terracotta installations with the assistance of a Thelma I. Pell research award.” On October 25, she presented a paper titled “Sonal Sculpture: Humanist Devotion at Orsanmichele” at the University of Michigan History of Art Graduate Student Symposium. Giffin has already had a paper titled “Saint Anne at Orsanmichele: A Study of Sixteenth-Century Devotion and Influence” accepted for the Renaissance Society of America 2015 annual meeting, which will take place in Berlin during late March.
Jennifer Henneman (PhD candidate) traveled to Hershey, Pennsylvania, in late May 2014 to participate in a Penn State University College of Medicine symposium titled “Medical Humanities: Clinical & Pedagogical Perspectives,” which brought together a wide variety of scholars for discussion. She is currently in London doing dissertation research supported by a Chester Fritz Fellowship. Henneman has been invited to give a guest lecture at Richmond, The American International University in London, in December. Her presentation title is “Queens, Cowgirls, and Courtesans: the Democracy of the Late-19th Century Shop Window.” She has received both a Buffalo Bill Center of the West Fellowship and a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship to continue her dissertation research in Cody, Wyoming, and Austin, Texas, respectively, during 2015. At the beginning of 2015, she will teach an independently developed course for the Division of Art History with a tentative title of “Manufacturing Fame: Exploring 19th Century Roots of Modern Celebrity in Portraiture and Visual Culture.”
Lauren Palmor (PhD candidate) spent June to August 2014 as a Graduate Summer Fellow at the Center for American Art, Philadelphia Art Museum. While there, she assisted the curators with preparations for upcoming exhibitions and conducted research for a future article. Palmor is currently at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library as a Dissertation Research Fellow, a position that lasts until the end of December. She says, “The rich library collections have provided me with comparative illustrations for my project, as well as many archival sources for studying the status of later life in visual contexts.” Palmor has an article titled “Price and Gilpin in the Cottage Garden: Reading the Picturesque in Late Victorian Watercolours,” which will be in the forthcoming issue of the arts and visual culture journal published by the University of St. Andrews.
Katie Tuft (PhD student) has an article titled “Traversing Boundaries: Cultural Philanthropy and the Craft of Mary Seton Watts” in a recent issue of Parnassus, which is published by the Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville. Her photograph showing a detail of the Watts Chapel has been used on the cover of the magazine.
Anna Wager (PhD student) attended the 2014 Summer Institute in Technical Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. The course was titled “The Artist’s Book: Materials and Processes”; in it she learned to understand the complex nature of book arts and was able to try her hand at basic binding, paper-making, and letterpress. She plans “to continue this object-focused research in my own work and teaching, especially as it pertains to nineteenth-century textiles and works on paper.” On October 17, as part of the 2014 conference of The Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States, Wager presented a paper titled “Intersecting Brotherhoods: Thomas Combe’s Pre-Raphaelite Art Collection.”
Amanda Waterman (PhD candidate) used a Luce American Art Dissertation Research Award to spend part of summer 2014 at the Yale University Art Gallery. While there, she consulted the Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial Collection. Waterman says, “With over 3000 objects in this collection, it is a treasure trove of material for my dissertation. Abbey had a direct connection with members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and became a major influence on Neo-Pre-Raphaelitism in the twentieth century.”