Category Archives: Alumnae/i

BMC History of Art alumnae and current student present at the 5th Annual Feminist Art History Conference

October 27, 2014 Nathanael Roesch

The Feminist Art History Conference, sponsored by the art history department at American University, brings together scholars who engage in the diverse approaches of feminist art history. The fifth annual conference, which will be held at American University from October 31st to November 2nd, 2014, celebrates the legacy of emerita American University feminist art historians Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard.

Jamie Richardson (PhD candidate) will present her work in the afternoon on November 1st. Her talk, “The Transforming Femininity of Emblematic Curiosity,” derives from her dissertation research. Below is an allegorical representation of Curiosity from an early modern emblem book housed in Bryn Mawr College’s Special Collections, which Jamie discusses in her paper.

Cesare Ripa and Giovanni Zaratino Castellini, “Curiositá.” From Iconologia Di Cesare Ripa: Divisa in Tre Libri, Ne I Quali Si Quali Si Esprimono Varie Imagini Di Virtù, Vitij, Affetti, Passioni Humane, Arti, Discipline, Humori, Elementi, Corpi Celesti, Prouincie D’Italia, Fiumi, & Altre Materie Infinite Vtili Ad Ogni Stato Di Persone. (Venice: C. Tomasini, 1645).

Also on Saturday afternoon, two History of Art alumnae will present papers in the session “Twentieth Century Feminist Icons: New Perspectives.” Mey‐Yen Moriuchi (MA ’08, PhD ’12) will present a paper entitled “Casta, Costumbrismo, Kahlo.” Rebecca Dubay (MA ’07, PhD ’11) will deliver “A Body That Falls: Mendieta’s Act of Remembrance.”

Alumnae/i

Alumni News: Susan Shifrin (PhD 1998)

August 6, 2014 Nathanael Roesch

Alumna Susan Shifrin (PhD 1998) was featured in the news for bringing art education to those living with Alzheimer’s. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Shifrin has started a branch of ARTZ: Artists for Alzheimer’s, a national organization that aims to use art to enrich and improve the lives of those suffering from dementia. Shifrin insists that those with dimentia are able to have cogent and lively conversations in front of works of art. Shifrin has caught the attention of local medical doctors who plan to study the effects of such art therapy.

For more, http://www.inquirer.com/front_page/breaking/20140804_Living_with_Alzheimer_s_with_the_help_of_art.html

Alumnae/i, Awards and Publications, Current Students, Graduate Insider Profiles, Miscellaneous News

GSAS Alumna to join National Academy

February 6, 2014 visualculture

Naomi Halas, M.A. ‘84 and Ph. D. ‘87 in physics at Bryn Mawr College, was elected to join the National Academy of Engineering for her research in nanoscale engineering of optical resonances and lineshapes. Prof. Halas is currently the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and holds appointments as Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, Physics & Astronomy at Rice University, Houston where she is also the Director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics.

Halas’ PhD research was performed with Daniel Grischkowsky at IBM Yorktown in the area of ultrafast nonlinear optics and dark soliton generation, including work on the first terahertz time-domain spectroscopy efforts. Dr. Halas joined Rice University following her postdoctoral fellowship at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where she studied time-resolved photoemission spectroscopy on semiconductor surfaces.

She is the author of more than 200 refereed publications, has more than 15 issued and pending patents, and has presented more than 300 invited talks. She is best known scientifically in the field of plasmonics as the inventor of tunable nanoparticles with resonances that span the visible and infrared regions of the spectrum, studying their properties and pursuing applications in biomedicine, chemical sensing, and energy.

Dr. Halas is co-founder of Nanospectra Biosciences, Inc., a company currently commercializing a photothermal cancer therapy based on her nanoparticles. She is founder and Director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) at Rice, which supports collaborations and interactions among researchers at Rice and other institutions nationally and internationally in the field of Plasmon-based optics and applications. She is the Principal Investigator of an NSF-funded integrative graduate education and research training grant (IGERT) in Nanophotonics, the first such graduate training program in the U.S.

http://halas.rice.edu/halas-bio