Kudos for Winter/Summer 2013

Here are some alumni accomplishments that we learned about in January.

David Choberka (MSP03)

David has been hired as the Mellon Academic Coordinator at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, where he works with faculty and graduate students to help them use the museum’s collection in research and teaching, along with coordinating collaborations with non-museum affiliated faculty and other collecting institutions on campus.

Henrike Florusbosch (MSP03)

Henrike continues as Visiting Assistant Professor at Leiden University (Netherlands) in the Department of Anthropology.  She has been asked to create a new course entitled “Heritage Protection in a Global Context: Discourses and Institutional Practices” as part of a new dual MA Program in Asian Studies and Heritage Studies.

Lisa Cakmak (MSP04)

Lisa has been promoted from Mellon Fellow in Ancient Art (a three year fellowship) to Assistant Curator of Ancient Art (a permanent position!) at the Saint Louis Art Museum

Lydia Herring-Harrington (MSP04)

Lydia recently completed her Niarchos Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she worked in the Arts of the Ancient World with a team of curators, designers, educators, conservators, collections care staff, and photographers on installing a new permanent gallery called “Gems and Jewelry from the Ancient Mediterannean.” Additionally, she gave a paper at the conference “Religion in Pieces” at Brown University on shrine paintings at Pompeii.

Deirdre Hennebury (MSP04)

After becoming the first Collections Fellow at Cranbrook’s new Center for Collections and Research, Deirdre curated a show called “Vision and Interpretation: Building Cranbrook, 1904-2012” on the architectural legacy of Cranbrook. Cranbrook’s Art Museum has been the focus of recent activity by Deirdre who served as Research Assistant for “Michigan Modern: Design that Shaped America,” an exhibition organized by the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office and the Cranbrook Art Museum for which Deirdre contributed interpretive materials.  Also at Cranbrook, Deirdre led tours of “Saarinen’s Cranbrook” as part of the Michigan Modern Symposium in the summer of 2013.

Erica Lehrer (MSP04)

Erica edited the book Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places with fellow MSP graduate, Monica Patterson (MSP07). Earlier this year Erica was also awarded tenure at Concordia University and is now an Associate Professor in History and Sociology-Anthropology.  Erica also has completed her first major exhibition entitled, “Souvenir, Talisman, Toy: Jews for Hearth and Home,” which opened in June 2013 at the Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, Poland.  And, Erica’s book, Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places, was recently published by Indiana University Press.

Heloise Finch-Boyer (MSP05)

After completing a three month internship at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, Heloise was offered a full-time position as Curator of the History of Science and Technology at the Maritime Museum.

John Low (MSP05)

John recently took a tenure track position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University-Newark.

Katharine Raff (MSP05)

Katie oversaw the production and development of LaunchPad, a multimedia program of interpretive materials for the Art Institute of Chicago’s newly reinstalled Galleries of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art, while working as Research Associate in the Department of Ancient and Byzantine Art. She is currently one of the Art Institute’s first Rice Foundation Curatorial Fellows, where she will work for the next three years in the Department of Ancient and Byzantine Art on an online scholarly publication of the Institute’s Roman art collection

Allison Byrnes (MSP06)

Alison has co-founded and is now director of the new Museum and Gallery Practices Program at Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology in Bangalore, India. The program’s year-long sequence of courses encompasses both the Advanced Diploma Program (a one-year Master’s) and a minor for undergraduate students.

Morgan Daniels (MSP06)

Morgan was awarded the University of Michigan Museum Studies Program’s Fellowship for Doctoral Research in Museums.

Ksenya Gurshtein (MSP06)

Ksenya’s dissertation, which she defended in 2011, was awarded the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award at the University of Michigan in April 2012.

KeunYoung Kim (MSP06)

KeunYoung has taken a researcher position at the Academy of Korean Studies in South Korea in the Department of Encyclopedia Compilation on Korean Culture, working on topics related to Overseas Korean.

Jason Nargis (MSP06)

Northwestern University archivist, Jason was featured in a recent Associated Press news story for his role in discovering a letter from the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte among a collection of documents given to the university some years ago.  In a happy ending for the French, Northwestern University has returned the letter to the consul general of France.  Jason hopes to publish an account of this experience in the near future.

Helen Dixon (MSP07)

As of August 15, Helen will be a Postdoctoral Teaching Scholar at North Carolina State University in Raleigh

Monica Patterson (MSP07)

Monica was awarded a Banting, Canada’s most prestigious postdoctoral fellowship to continue her work at the Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence at Concordia University. In the last year she has co-edited two books, one with fellow MSP graduate, Erica Lehrer (MSP04), called Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places; the other volume is Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge and Questioning Discipline. She and Erica have had an article published in Anthropology News about their work in teaching students to digitally re-curate survivor testimony. Beyond this, she works as a consultant for the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia and the Montreal Holocaust and Memorial Centre and is serving on the board of “From Swastika to Jim Crow,” where she is helping plan an exhibit in Montreal in 2014. She also begins a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa in July 2014.  Carleton has allowed Monica to defer her start date to allow her to finish a two-year Banting postdoc working with MSP alum Erica Lehrer (MSP04) at the Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence (CEREV) at Concordia University in Montreal.

Tasha Rijke-Epstein (MSP07)

A collaboration between Tasha and colleagues at the Mozea Akiba in Mahajanga, Madagascar has resulted in a new permanent exhibition for the museum, “City of Faiths, Ties with Traditions: Religion and Shifting Spiritual Practices in Mahajanga, 1850-Present.”

Lindsay Stern (MSP07)

Lindsay has completed three years as Education Coordinator at the Center for Photography at Woodstock (NY).  Lindsay was recently awarded the Ora Schneider Residency at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale (NY), a funded residency that will allow Lindsay to work in their silkscreen studio later this year.  Lindsay and her husband, Tom, announced the birth of a son (and future MSPer?) in July 2013.

Luciana Aenasoaie (MSP08)

Luciana had her first article, “Conversing artifacts: an exploration into the communicative power of inanimate things,” published in the Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, published this fall. She also presented at the Museums and Communities: The heritage of belonging Conference in November.

Marc Levitt (MSP08)

Marc has been promoted to the post of Director of Archives at the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies in Shepherdstown, WV.  In May of 2013, Marc spoke on a panel on Capitol Hill’s 2013 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference. And, to cap a year of accomplishments, Marc and his wife announce the birth of a son in July 2013!

Andrea McDonnell (MSP08)

Andrea has begun her job at Emmanuel College in Boston, where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Media Studies. She has been invited to attend the 2013 Northeast Modern Association Conference, where she will be presenting a paper entitled “Heroes, Villains, and Transformers: Representing Pregnancy in Celebrity Gossip Magazines.” In July, as Visiting Assistant Professor of Communications in the Department of English at Emmanuel College (Boston), she announced the forthcoming publication of her book, Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines, by Polity Press, in early 2014.

Ricardo Punzalan (MSP08)

Ricardo has been offered a tenure-track Assistant Professor position by the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. He will be teaching archives and digital curatorship.

Aimee VonBokel (MSP08)

Aimee has accepted the position of Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of Museum Studies at New York University beginning fall 2013.  She joins another MSP alum, Hima Mallampati (MSP05), who has been teaching in the same role at NYU for several years.

Joseph Cialdella (MSP09)

Following his internship at the Archives of American Gardens at the Smithsonian, Joseph was awarded the year-long Enid A. Haput Fellowship at the Archive. He also co-presented a workshop called Lessons from the Garden at the American Alliance of Museums Annual Meeting and Museum Expo in May.

Sarah Gothie (MSP09)

Sarah’s paper, “Feeling ‘Like a Child’: Memory, Egoism, and Refuge at Green Gables Heritage Place,” was selected for workshopping at the Irmgard Coninx Foundation’s transnational roundtable on “Travel and Museums: Rethinking the Modern Experience” in Berlin during the summer of 2013.  Sarah’s paper was excerpted from a dissertation chapter based on research conducted during her MSP Practicum in fall 2011.

Andrew Gurstelle (MSP09)

Andrew co-curated a recently opened exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art called “African Art and the Shape of Time.”

Neha Paliwal (MSP09)

Neha published an op-ed article entitled, “How Objects Get to Museums” on the subject of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s decision to repatriate two Cambodian statues in The Indian Express in June 2013.

Kristine Ronan (MSP09)

Kristine received the John H. Dryfout Museum Studies Internship Award to do her internship at Monticello earlier this year. Since then, she has been offered the 2012-2013 CIC / Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship, based at the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History, where she will work on research for her dissertation.

Alison Vacca (MSP09)

Upon completion of a one year post-doc at the University of Michigan, Alison will join the faculty of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as Assistant Professor of Islamic History.  In addition to a successful defense of her dissertation in April 2013, Alison announces the birth of a second son, Breccan James, in February 2013.

Anna Wieck (MSP09)

Anna was awarded a Fulbright Grant to study in Madrid during the 2013/14 academic year.

Sanam Arab (MSP11)

Sanam was invited to present her paper “Bringing Museums to Libraries: Exhibition Spaces at the University of Michigan Libraries” at the Michigan Museums Association this fall.

Jenny Kreiger (MSP11)

Jenny co-wrote an essay entitled “Effective Collaborations: The Case of the Dominated and Demeaned Exhibition at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology” that has been published in A Handbook for Academic Museums: Exhibitions and Education. 

Shannon Schmoll (MSP11)

Shannon received an outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers after being nominated by her department at the University of Michigan.  She also began 2013 with three important life events—the successful defense of her dissertation, the birth of a daughter, and her hire as a STEM Specialist at the Field Museum in Chicago.  Congratulations x 3, Shannon!

Catalina Esguerra (MSP12)

As recipient of a University of Michigan International Institute Individual Fellowship, Catalina spent summer 2013 in Colombia conducting research on emerging sites of memory surrounding the ongoing paramilitary/FARC conflict in that country.