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Achievements from Students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

View our latest newsletter and read more about Faculty, Student, and Alumni Achievements from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Archaeology

Tracey Cian acquired the newly created international students' representative position in the Graduate Student Association this fall. She organized the first International Student Tea in October and will meet with the Admissions' Office in December to work on support for incoming international graduate students at �鶹��Ƶ.

Andrea Samz-Pustol conducted dissertation research at museums in Greece and Italy this fall. She will present a paper at the in San Francisco in January 2022. She is also working on a chapter on ancient furniture for the publication of the 3rd-century BCE house that she has been helping to excavate at Morgantina in Sicily. Finally, Andrea is curating a small exhibit of fruit representations at the Aidone Archaeological Museum in Sicily, which will show how the people of ancient Morgantina used fruit and fruit models to worship the gods. 

Zach Silvia returned to the Hellenistic site Bashtepa in the Bukhara Oasis, Uzbekistan, from August to mid-September as a member of the Uzbek American Expedition in Bukhara (NYU-Uzbek Academy of Sciences), in part gathering data for his dissertation on ancient rural life in Central Asia at the end of the first millennium BCE. Additionally, from Nov. 18-21 he presented preliminary results, in poster format, from his ongoing project titled "A New Archaeological Map of Central Asia in Antiquity" at the in Chicago. His project aims to be an online open access database of Central Asian archaeological sites from the fourth c. BCE - third c. CE. He also served as teaching assistant for Professor Lindenlauf's archaeological fieldwork and methods course.

Chemistry

Cassandra Gates attained her Ph.D. candidacy this fall and was selected as a speaker for the in Ventura, Calif. She will give a presentation titled "The Structural and Electronic effects of Modifications on Synthetic Molybdenum Cofactor Models.”

Classics

Jenni Glaser taught an intensive Latin course for the Polis Institute this past summer. In January, she will present at the in San Francisco. The paper is titled "Silence speaks louder than words: The Missing Myths in Pindar’s Olympian 1, Olympian 13, and Pythian 11."

History of Art

Nina Blomfield began her 2021-2023 term as The Marie Zimmermann Decorative Arts Trust Collections Fellow at the in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. She is preparing a publication on the decorative art and studio craft collections of Cranbrook’s Smith House, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Usonian home. In September, Nina attended the in Salem, Mass., as the recipient of a Dewey Lee Curtis Symposium Scholarship. In May, she presented the talk: ““The Truer Artists”: Japanese Screen Painting at Ichi Ban Studios, San Francisco,” for the panel “Mobile Forms, Objects, Genres,” part of the NAVSA Virtual Series Victorian Studies, Asia, and the Pacific.

Elena Gittleman conducted field work this semester to study approximately 150 objects at the Musée du Louvre, Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), Altes Museum (Berlin), Bode-Museum, Hessisches Landesmuseum (Darmstadt), and the British Museum (London). In addition, Elena traveled to Urkraine to examine the medieval Byzantine frescoes at the in Kyiv and the at the Bibliotheca Nacionale de España (Madrid). In the spring, Elena will continue her research in Istanbul and Athens.

Tessa Haas began the position of in Philadelphia this past summer and is looking forward to working with �鶹��Ƶ museum studies fieldwork seminar interns in the spring. Additionally, Tessa is planning a show in spring 2022 at , a co-operative gallery that she runs with several artists, friends, and curators in the city, which recently relocated to the Crane Arts Building at 1400 N American St. in Philadelphia.

Laurel V McLaughlin curated two exhibitions this fall. She curated the the traveling survey, , Sept. 2–Nov. 13, 2021 at the Lafayette College Art Galleries (it will open at Emerson Contemporary, Boston in fall 2022). The accompanying bilingual digital publication was edited by Laurel and features the work of Emilio Rojas, Pamela Sneed, Valeria Luisalli, Ernesto Pujol, Rebecca Schneider, Ethan Madarieta, and Mechtild Widrich with Andrei Pop and is forthcoming in December 2021.

In addition, Laurel curated the current exhibition , Nov. 11, 2021–Jan. 9, 2022, featuring the work of Emmanuela Soria Ruiz at Fuller Rosen Gallery, Portland, Ore. The exhibition is accompanied by a programming series and is supported by a 2021 Make/Learn/Build grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and a 2021 Acción Cultural Española PICE Mobility Grant.

Currently, Laurel is curating two forthcoming exhibitions in spring 2022 including Dyschronics, featuring the work of Carolina Caycedo, Emily Jacir, Baseera Khan, and Tsedaye Makonnen, and Footnotes and other embedded stories, featuring the Yale University Art Gallery and Artspace, New Haven 2021–2022 Doran Artists in Residence. Laurel McLaughlin also presented, with Emilio Rojas, “Returning to the Open Wound of the Archive with Emilio Rojas through Gloria E. Anzaldúa,” at the  "Visual Arts and the Feminist, Affective Archive: The Present and Future of the Archive in Arts-Based Research," at the Université de Montréal.

Finally, Laurel was awarded the 2021 Make/Learn/Build grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, Portland, Ore.; the 2021 Acción Cultural Española PICE Mobility Grant, Spain; and the 2021–2022 The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, University of Pennsylvania, Project Grant, UPenn.

Emily R. Shoyer served as the consulting curator at the in New York City. As the curator of the exhibition , which opened to the public on Nov. 4 and is on view at the Museum through Feb. 8, 2022, Emily built off of her past research during her Master's degree in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She selected 14 international female-identifying artists who all directly confront sexually motivated violence in a variety of its permutations through the multi-media artwork on display in the exhibition. Assisting Emily in doing this work is her exhibition partner and sponsor the .

Nava Streiter presented a conference paper titled “Stasis and Kinesis in the Kokkinobaphos Illustrations” at the in Cleveland. In addition, she also co-curated , currently up at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Nava worked on it during a 2019-20 graduate curatorial internship in the museum’s manuscripts department. Finally, Nava is excited to be co-chairing �鶹��Ƶ’s upcoming graduate symposium “,” and to be co-curating the symposium exhibition with Mallory Fitzpatrick (Department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies) and Yusi Liu (Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology).

Mechella Yezernitskaya was awarded the 2020–2021 American Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Association of University Women, one of the largest and oldest scholarship programs for women in the world. Mechella also received a grant from the Walter Read Hovey Memorial Fund for achievements in art history from The Pittsburgh Foundation. In addition, Mechella published her article titled "Civilians Seeing the War: Olga Rozanova's and Aleksei Kruchenykh's 1916 War," in Artistic Expressions and the Great War, A Hundred Years On, edited by Sally Debra Charnow (Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing, 2020), 155–182, which was awarded an honorable mention in the competition given by the Association of Print Scholars, in recognition of compelling and innovative research on fine art prints and printmaking by early-career scholars.  

Mechella reviewed  by Joshua Simon (Archive Books, 2019) for ARTMargins Online (January 2020); edited by Elena S. Danielson, Vladimir Riga, Andrei Ruzhnikov, and Lada Tremsina for Slavic and East European Information Resources 21 (2020): 326–328; and  by Iva Glisic (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018) for Slavic and East European Information Resources 22 (2021): 124–126.  

Mathematics

Lindsay Dever published the article “ “ in the International Mathematics Research Notices this past October in collaboration with Djordje Milićević. She also gave an invited talk, titled “Distribution of Holonomy on Compact Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds,” this year at the (virtual, hosted by Darmstadt) and another talk, “Counting geodesics on compact hyperbolic 3-manifolds,” at (Dynamics and Group Geometry Early Researchers Seminar), which was virtual and hosted by the University of Warwick. Finally, Lindsay will be attending the in Seattle in January and giving an invited talk at a special session, for which she was award a travel grant from The American Mathematical Society.

Physics 

Olivia McAuley presented at the this past year. Her talk focused on how and why an approximately eight-billion-year-old cluster of stars still exists in our Milky Way galaxy. In her talk for the "Dynamics Day," Olivia explained how these stars can be affected if they reside at a particular stable point, called a Lagrange point.

Andy Clark published a paper titled “." Ultrasoft magnetorheological elastomers are fascinating physiologically relevant material that have the unique capability to rapidly, and reversibly stiffen when a magnetic field is applied to them. The paper focuses on characterizing their magnetic field-dependent effects and provides the framework for biologists to use these materials as a platform to study how cells respond to dynamic changes in their mechanical environment. In addition, he co-authored two  published papers titled “” and “.” Andy also co-authored a conference paper titled “Confined Transducer Geometries to Enhance Sensitivity to Thermal Boundary Conductance in Frequency-Domain Thermoreflectance Measurements,” which was presented at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers'.

Andy was also joined by fellow BMC physics graduate and undergraduate students at an outreach event on Oct. 10 hosted by the American Helicopter Museum and Education Center where he performed physics demonstrations for middle school students. He is also planning an outreach event this spring at BMC for middle school students with limited Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) exposure.