All posts by Nathanael Roesch

Awards and Publications, Current Students

Summer Internship Spotlight: Kathryn Bryant and Hannah Schwartz

Bryant CTY

Pictured: Kathryn Bryant at CTY with her class, flashing the “theorem proved” sign!

Mathematics graduate students Hannah Schwartz and Kathryn Bryant served as teaching assistants for the Center for Talented Youth (CTY). CTY brings exceptionally bright middle- and high-schoolers together for three-week intensive academic programs. Graduate students, professors, teachers, and other professionals then teach undergraduate-level courses to these students, who are between 12 and 16 years of age. It is an internationally renowned program, and there are sites located at colleges and universities all around the U.S.. Hannah worked nearby at Haverford College for a program that explored the relevance of Math in Art; Kathryn participated in the program at Johns Hopkins University focusing on Mathematical Logic.

Hannah and Kathryn also attended a week-long workshop at the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) at Brown University. The topic was Combinatorial Link Homology Theories, Braids, and Contact Geometry, which relates both to Hannah’s masters’ research and Kathryn’s doctoral research.

Current Students

Summer Internship Spotlight: Zachary Silvia

Summer Intern - Silvia sm

This past summer, Zachary Silvia served as the trench supervisor at the Tarsus – Gözlükule site under the direction of Aslı Özyar, Boğaziçi University. The archaeological excavation at Tarsus – Gözlükule, located in the Mersin province of Southern Turkey, is a mound site of the well-known ancient city of Tarsus located in the Cilician Plain. The site features material from the Neolithic to early Islamic periods without any major break in habitation.

The site was first excavated in the 1930’s and 1940’s by Bryn Mawr College under the direction of Hetty Goldman. The site is now excavated as a collaborative effort between Boğaziçi University and Bryn Mawr College under the direction of Bryn Mawr alum Aslı Özyar.

Each dig season students from Bryn Mawr, such as Zachary, are asked to join an international team of students and researchers for six weeks in the field to contribute to our ongoing understanding of this extremely significant ancient city. The 2014 excavation season specifically focused on Late Bronze Age, Early Roman, Late Roman, and Abbasid period material culture.

The excavation integrates members of the Tarsus community into the project, which according to Zachary, is of equal importance to the excavated material itself. He sees it not just as an effort to encourage a localized sense of cultural heritage and place, but also as an opportunity to bring students from entirely different cultural and social backgrounds together to build a sense of shared world heritage and camaraderie with individuals local to Tarsus.

For more information about the Tarsus site, visit: http://www.tarsus.boun.edu.tr

Placements

Professor Dale Kinney to serve as acting director of the Graduate Group

Dale Kinney sm

For the 2014-2015 academic year, former dean of the GSAS and Professor Emerita Dale Kinney will serve as acting director of the Graduate Group. The Group is thrilled to see Professor Kinney in this role, since it was her idea to found the Graduate Group in the first place. Professor Kinney believed that Bryn Mawr’s relatively small size would enable the College to create and foster multi-disciplinary conversations. We look forward to a year of further growth and exciting new opportunities for interdisciplinary scholarship under her leadership.

The dean, faculty, and students would also like to thank Professor Conybeare for her eight years of service to the Graduate Group. Among the numerous achievements of her outstanding tenure, Professor Conybeare’s organization of the 10-year Anniversary celebration this past April shall stand as testament to her enthusiasm for the Graduate Group and her ambitious vision for its continued success.

Current Students, Outside Awards

Summer Internship Spotlight: Michelle Smiley

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

This summer, Michelle Smiley served as a graduate student intern at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where she worked in the department of photography under curator Diane Waggoner. Michelle spent much of her time doing research for an upcoming exhibit of nineteenth-century photography on the east coast of the United States, titled “East of the Mississippi” (forthcoming, fall 2016). In particular, she researched individual photographers like William Herman Rau, a photographer for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Henry Peter Bosse, a German-American photographer who served in the United States Corps of Engineers out of Rock Island, Illinois. Bosse photographed the development of the Mississppi in the 1880s and 1890s.

Above, Michelle can be seen cataloguing one of the twenty Bosse cyanotypes given to the National Gallery of Art. These are all part of the series “Views on the Mississippi River” which were displayed as an album at the 1893-94 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.

The prestigious internship program at the National Gallery of Art also includes bi-weekly seminars that introduce the interns to all aspects of museum work, from library image collections, to curatorial, to the director’s office.

Alumnae/i

Alumni News: Susan Shifrin (PhD 1998)

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