Xiao Wang, Ph.D candidate in Physics, has been chosen as one of the two winners of the 2015 Student Poster Prize by the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. Xiao’s project was titled: “Magnetic exchange interaction between Fe³+ and Ho³+ ions in hexagonal HoFeO3 thin films.”
Shannon Steiner received a two-year Samuel H. Kress Foundation Institutional Fellowship at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (Central Institute for Art History) in Munich, Germany, which will support her dissertation research on the subject of Byzantine cloisonné enamel.
The Samuel H. Kress Foundation is a premier source of grant and fellowship support for the study, preservation, and conservation of European art before the 19th century. The Kress Foundation partners with six European research centers for art history and offers one pre-doctoral fellowship per year for each.
The ZIKG in Munich is an internationally recognized research center for art history founded in 1946. It houses one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive art history libraries. The ZIKG especially supports object-based research with a focus on materials and techniques, art history as a specialized science, and art history in a global context.
The Institut is also home to the Forschungsstelle Realienkunde (Material Culture Research Center), which promotes research on the intersection of materials, technology, and representation. Shannon was particularly drawn to the triangulated research approach at the ZIKG because her dissertation frames Byzantine enamel as the visual manifestation of complex materials/chemical sciences and explores how the medium could embody and communicate ideas about the Byzantine Empire’s power over the natural world.
At the ZIKG, Shannon’s research will focus first on studying surviving Byzantine texts ranging from alchemical treatises to poetry to manuals on courtly protocol for mention of enamel, in order to glean information about its cultural significance and use. She will then undertake significant object-based study, including macrophotography of surviving Byzantine enameled objects in Germany, Italy, France, the UK, and The Republic of Georgia in order to document unique characteristics of their design, material composition and fabrication. Her ultimate goal is to bring these objects’ material characteristics into dialogue with textual evidence concerning enamel’s meaning in Byzantine society and diplomacy.
Graduate students from both the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research convened for the 9th Annual Graduate Student Research Symposium on April 9th 2015.
The event, organized by the Graduate Student Association, kicked off the festivities of Graduate Student Appreciation Week, a nation-wide event founded in 1993 by the National Association of Graduate and Professional Students.
Held in Thomas Great Hall, the Symposium brought together students and faculty from both schools to pour over the exciting research of several students, who presented their work in poster format.
Students from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences also took the opportunity to announce this year’s recipient of the Graduate Faculty Mentorship Award, Professor Emerita Christiane Hertel, History of Art. Two of Professor Hertel’s doctoral advisees, Jamie Richardson and Anna Moblard-Meier, presented the award and shared examples of their advisor’s exemplary mentoring and guidance.
The tragic news of the violent destruction of ancient artifacts and cultural heritage sites in the Middle East by Islamic State militants has prompted widespread condemnation and outrage from around the globe. Maggie Beeler (PhD candidate in Archaeology) and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University have organized a conference that, in light of recent world events, has taken on added urgency.
The conference, The Future of the Past: From Amphipolis to Mosul – New Approaches to Cultural Heritage Preservation in the Eastern Mediterranean, convenes April 10th-11th at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Dr. Morag Kersel (DePaul University) will deliver the imperative keynote address: “Go, Do Good! Responsibility and the Future of Cultural Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 21st Century.”
As Beeler explains:
“We organized the conference in order to foster a dialogue among emerging scholars on the topic on cultural heritage preservation. The conference is timely, though, because it serves to underscore the urgency of cultural heritage preservation efforts in light of the recent rash of destruction of ancient artifacts, both the intentional destruction of archaeological sites and antiquities in museums at the hands of militants and unintentional destruction resulting from violent conflict in the region.”
The two-day conference will also host three sessions of papers by young scholars exploring new and better ways to preserve and protect the past while contending with contemporary political considerations.
Amy Wojciechowski has been working with the Philadelphia Museum of Art Spotlight Educators program since August 2014. This is her second position with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, having previously held a curatorial internship from September 2012 to November 2013 to work on the 2013-2014 exhibition Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis. The Spotlight Educators program is open to all visitors to the Museum, and focuses on having a conversation around a single work in the permanent collection selected by the Spotlight Educator. Amy has previously led discussions on Henri Rousseau’s 1906 The Merry Jesters, Viggo Johansen’s 1887 My Friends, and Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 work Rain. She will be leading a March talk on Édouard Manet’s 1873 Le Bon Bock. At Bryn Mawr, she is busy studying for her PhD preliminary exams and preparing to go abroad to pursue archival research for her work on Polish modernism.
