Category Archives: Report from the Field

Conferences and Presentations, Current Students, Report from the Field

Report from the Field: Maggie Beeler co-organizes timely conference on cultural heritage preservation

Future-of-the-Past

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.

Current Students, Report from the Field

Report from the Field: Amy Wojciechowski Talks Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

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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.

Manet - Le Bon Bock

Current Students, Outside Awards, Report from the Field

Report from the Field: Katherine Rochester’s Animated Year in Germany

Photo by Constance Mensh

­­Before Pixar, before Looney Tunes, before Disney, there was Lotte Reiniger.

“Who?” you might ask and we wouldn’t blame you for the Weimar-era director and pioneer of animation has been all but forgotten, particularly in U.S. histories of film.

But, today, a Bryn Mawr doctoral student, Katherine Rochester M.A. ’12 is aiming to write Reiniger back into the history books.

Born in Berlin in 1899, Reiniger was the first woman—the first person­­—to direct a feature-length animated film. Called Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed), this long-neglected masterpiece knit together stories from the classic One Thousand and One Nights. A critical and popular success in its day, the film employs a silhouette animation technique reminiscent of wayang shadow puppetry.

Rochester

Rochester is spending the academic year as a fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. Using Berlin as a launching pad, she is visiting museums and archives throughout Germany to conduct research for her dissertation, which focuses on experimental animation and the conventions of its display.

Recently, she reported back from Tübingen, where she happily sifted through a treasure trove of artist Reiniger’s exquisite work. Next up: visits to the silhouette museum in Vreden and the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf.

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A fourth-year Ph.D. candidate, Katherine has worked as a curatorial internship for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2012 Whitney Biennial and as the curatorial assistant for the exhibition Jason Rhoades, Four Roads, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. In addition, she has written for Art in America, Artforum, and other publications.

Archive spread

Photo credits: Katherine Rochester, Stadtmuseum Tübingen.

Current Students, Outside Awards, Report from the Field

Report from the Field: Alex Bray Hunts Medieval Images in Jordan

Alex Bray (Ph.D. candidate, History of Art) is spending the academic year in Jordan. He has just completed a CAORC ACOR Pre-doctoral fellowship, and has now begun the SSRC IDRF-funded portion of his research travel. Thus far, Alex has been able to visit a number of sites and museums related to his research on images of hunting produced within the Umayyad empire, and to discuss his research with scholars who have excavated at some of these sites. Recently, he has been visiting the excavated ruins of early medieval churches and domestic complexes throughout the region in order to see and photograph related mosaics of predation and hunting.

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Alex is currently focusing on an excavation of a late seventh- or early eighth-century bathhouse associated with an estate known as Qastal, only a few kilometers west of the Queen Alia international airport. The bathhouse was excavated a little over a decade ago, but a significant portion of the structure was paved over before it was discovered by archaeologists. Although they were only able to uncover about a fifth of the building’s foundations and floors, this was enough to make it clear that the bathhouse resembles those at two other Umayyad sites in Jordan, known as Ḥammām al-Ṣarāḥ and Quṣayr ʿAmra. In addition to researching the significance of the impressive mosaics of predation that were discovered in the bathhouse, Ales is attempting to situate them within an architectural context based on these more complete monuments.

Using plans of Quṣayr ʿAmra and the excavations at Qastal, he has created a digital model of the building that probably once existed at Qastal (seen above). To clarify that this is only a hypothetical reconstruction, he has used image editing software to render his model in a watercolor finish, rather than risk creating a misleading photorealistic rendering.

Current Students, Report from the Field

Report from the Field: Danielle Smotherman Digs into Research Abroad

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Danielle Smotherman is spending the 2014-2015 academic year at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens as an associate member. Danielle has joined the regular members on trips around Greece, visiting archaeological sites and museums as well as giving reports on specific monuments and sites. These trips offer firsthand experience of archaeological sites spanning from the prehistoric to modern times, with a focus on antiquity, as well as in-depth knowledge of the topography of the regions. During the winter term, Danielle continued her visits to area sites and monuments, both within Athens and the greater region of Attica, and met with important scholars in the field.

As part of the program, Danielle has been researching three votive relief fragments from excavations at Corinth, which will be included in a future Hesperia article. In Athens, she is also accomplishing important research for her dissertation, which has a working title of “Decoding Meaning: Understanding Communication in Athenian Vase-Painting of the Archaic and Classical Periods.”

In the spring and summer, Danielle will participate in three excavation projects at Corinth, Greece; Naukratis, Egypt; and Vacone, Italy. At Vacone, Danielle is hoping to apply Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), a technique she first learned and applied to pottery in the Special Collections at Bryn Mawr College, to small finds recovered from the Roman villa. On a non-academic note, in December, Danielle and Wesley Bennett, also in the department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, were engaged by the temple of Poseidon at Sounion.

Danielle’s studies at the ASCSA are funded by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, and the Ridgway Curatorial Fellowship.