All posts by Nathanael Roesch

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GSAS alumna named to Widener board of trustees

Sophia Wisniewska (M.A., Ph.D., Russian) has been appointed to the board of trustees of Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania. Wisniewska received her Ph.D. in 1992, completing a dissertation, Narrative Structure in the Work of Tatjana Tolstaja, under the direction of Professor Dan E. Davidson.

After completing her PhD, Wisniewski held teaching positions at Penn State, Temple University and Bryn Mawr College. She served as chancellor of Penn State Brandywine from 2005 to 2013, when she became regional chancellor of the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg.

Two named to Widener board on Page B3 of Tuesday June 24, 2014 issue of Philadelphia Inquirer – Philly Edition

Current Students

Summer Internship Spotlight: Mechella Yezernitskaya

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This past summer, Mechella Yezernitskaya (History of Art) was the Thomas Walther Collection Research intern in the Photography and Conservation departments at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Above she can be seen studying a Roman Karmen photograph, entitled Moscow Illuminations Celebrating the Tenth Anniversary of the Russian Revolution (1927), in the Photo and Paper Conservation lab at the museum.

Current Students

Summer Internship Spotlight: Matthew Jameson

Jameson in the trech

This summer Matt Jameson (M.A. 2014) participated in the archaeological excavations at Gournia on the Mirabello Bay in Eastern Crete. Gournia is a Bronze Age site that was first excavated by Harriet Boyd in 1901. The project was run through the University of Buffalo, with a permit from the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. The project director was Professor Vance Watrous out of the University of Buffalo, and the field director was Matt Buell, a recent PhD student also from the University of Buffalo. The group used the facilities at INSTAP (Institute for Aegean Prehistory) in East Crete as the research center for the project, where all finds from the field were taken for analysis.

Matt served as one of the trench supervisors for the project; his role was to oversee five students and supervise the activities going on within the trench. In total, his group excavated four trenches, covering an area of approximately 42 square meters. Supervising the trench entailed keeping a daily notebook recording any and all daily activities in the field including daily drawings and recording of finds/elevations, and a final report for each trench at the end of the season. The aim of his group’s excavation (there were excavations in a number of different areas of the site, each with different research questions and goals) was to explore the industrial areas at the northern border of the site.

At the INSTAP research center Matt worked with the floatation team, helping supervise a number of students in the processing of soil samples from the field. This entailed the flotation process, where the soil samples were “cleaned” and sorted into the heavy residue and the vegetal material, and the sorting of the heavy residue samples – where the nondiagnostic material was separated from the more diagnostic finds such as marine shell, bone, etc. His team put in many hours over the course of the project, working six days a week with only Saturday afternoon and Sunday off. In total, the project comprised 107 members, including students and senior staff, all of whom stayed in the village of Pachia Ammos on the coast directly to the east of the site.

For more information about the Gournia dig, check out:

http://www.gournia.org/

Current Students

Xiao Wang, PhD candidate in Physics, is lead author of new article in Applied Physics Letters

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Xiao Wang is the first author of a new study published in the online journal, Applied Physics Letters, “Time-resolved photoemission electron microscopy imaging of mode coupling between three interacting magnetic vortices” (Vol. 105, Issue 10). Xuemei May Cheng, Professor of Physics at Bryn Mawr College, served as the correspondence author.

The experimental part of this work was done at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago.

Current Students, Outside Awards

Summer Internship Spotlight: Charlie Kuper

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Photo caption: A rare depiction of a Byzantine school (from the Madrid Skylitzes).

This past summer Charlie Kuper (PhD Candidate, MA 2013) participated in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Greek Summer School in Washington, DC. The focus of this school was its daily translation sessions from a wide variety of both prose and poetic texts from the 4th through the 15th centuries, including orations of Gregory of Nazianzus, Athonite legal documents, and excerpts from the epic poem Digenes Akrites. The program also included a mini-course on Greek paleography, in which participants studied the most important majuscule and minuscule Greek scripts and were able to view some of the facsimiles in the Dumbarton Oaks collection.  During his time in Washington, Charlie was also able to finish one of his current side projects, the first modern language translation of the Life of St. Martha (early 7th century) under the guidance of the faculty there.