Kudos for Fall 2014

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

Henrike Florusbosch (MSP03)

Henrike has begun blogging for the Leiden Institute’s Anthropology Department. Her posts center around fieldwork, gender, and heritage, both in Mali and the Netherlands, with heritage and other museum topics to follow. She also published a comparative piece on local heritage initiatives in Mali and Ghana for Anthropology News.

Luna Khirfan (MSP03)

Luna’s current research at the University of Waterloo underscores public participation and the involvement of local communities. Specifically, she uses design charrettes to involve local communities in the Caribbean in decisions related to climate change adaptation. Her upcoming book (scheduled for publication December 2014) deals with questions of cultural heritage (tangible and intangible), particularly in its epilogue. Her book will be titled World Heritage, Urban Design and Tourism: Three Cities in the Middle East.  

Michael Andre (MSP04)

Michael André has just returned from a visit to the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, where he met with colleagues to discuss several translation projects. Currently he is participating as translator in a volume on ceramics and porcelain, the latest installment in the six-volume, dual-language (German-English) project, Henry van de Velde. Interior Design and Decorative Arts. A Catalogue Raisonné in Six Volumes. He is also producing an English translation of Goethes Wohnhaus (Goethe’s House), part of a series on the historic houses of Weimar. Personally, he is about to begin a project involving an English translation of the writings of Henry van de Velde, a Belgian designer who was active in Weimar in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Kathryn Stine (MSP04)

Kathryn has started a new position as Senior Digital Image Curator at UC Berkeley in the History of Art Department, where she will be working directly with faculty, students and researchers with cultural content, supporting innovative curriculum.

Leah Niederstadt (MSP05)

Leah co-wrote an article with a colleague examining blended and object-based learning titled “Digital Projects and the First Year Seminar: Making Blended Learning Work at a Small Liberal Arts College,” publication forthcoming. In addition, she presented at the AAM annual meeting where her presentation was entitled, “Smartphones, Scanners, and Student Labor: Digitizing Wheaton’s Permanent Collection.” Leah also organized a panel entitled “Curating, Debating, Drawing, Seeing, Writing: Using Collections to Engage College Students” for the New England Museum Association (NEMA) annual conference last November in Newport, RI where she also presented her paper,  “Why Do We Have All This Stuff? Student Engagement with Collections at a Liberal Arts College.”

Kathy Zarur (MSP05)

Kathy is currently curating an exhibition of artist books for a gallery called a.Muse Gallery in San Francisco, which will open in late September. In addition, she plans to defend her dissertation this fall.

Morgan Daniels (MSP06)

Morgan successfully defended her dissertation, “Data Reuse in Museum Contexts: Experiences of Archaeologists and Botanists” this past May. In August, she began a two year post-doc, as a Council on Library and Information Resources Fellow for Data Curation in the Social Sciences at Vanderbilt University, where she will be using her research experience and knowledge of data curation to develop systems and services to help researchers across the university manage and publish their research data.

Kelly Fayard (MSP06)

Kelly was recently reappointed at Bowdoin College, and she will also be starting a residential fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe as the Anne Ray scholar.  This position also mentors two Anne Ray fellows who intern at the Indian Arts and Research Center and is meant to help the interns get more experience in the museum world.

Jason Nargis (MSP06)

Jason is currently a library fellow at the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. Jason’s project, Signal and Noise in the Art and Teaching of Ed Paschke, will study and interpret materials in the archive of Chicago-based painter and former Northwestern faculty member, Ed Paschke (1939-2004), whose papers are held at the University Archives. Jason primarily aims to examine how Paschke’s role as a teacher and mentor informed his artistic sensibility and professional output.

Tamara Shreiner (MSP06)

Tamara Shreiner is currently working as a history teacher and history department chair at Greenhills School in Ann Arbor.  She recently published an article titled “Using Historical Knowledge to Reason about Contemporary Political Issues: An Expert-Novice Study” released in this fall’s issue of Cognition & Instruction.

Lindsay Stern (MSP07)

After four years as Education Coordinator at the Center for Photography at Woodstock (NY), Lindsay is starting work at Etsy in Hudson, NY in the Marketplace Integrity Department. While it is a transition from public to private sector work, Lindsay is eager to use her art, research, and administrative skills in a completely new context. In addition, her collage work has been curated into the group exhibition “Hunter/Gatherer,” which examines social relationships to food and food supply in the United States, it will be on display this fall at the Truman State University Gallery in Kirksville, Missouri.

Andrea McDonnell (MSP08)

Andrea recently started her third year as an Assistant Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Emmanuel College in Boston. In addition, she returned to the University of Michigan in April to give a lecture at the Department of Communication Studies, where she discussed a chapter from her book, Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines, published in June by Polity Press.

Aimee VonBokel (MSP08)

Aimee has finished her first year as an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the NYU Museum Studies Program, where she taught two classes this year: “The History and Theory of Museums” and “Historic Sites, Cultural Landscapes, and the Politics of Preservation.” The latter combines her training in urban history and museum studies, and involved trips all over New York City to learn about which memories are preserved and which are not, how such projects are funded, and how this impacts our perception of what it means to be a New Yorker and/or an American. This year, she will present papers on the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and the Weeksville Heritage Center at the Urban History Association Conference in Philadelphia and at the Annual Social Science History Association in Toronto.

Lea Bullard (MSP08)

Lea currently works as the Assistant Director of General Education Assessment at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Personally, in 2012, she founded and currently serves as the director of a collaborative and cooperative group of local artisans called Handmade Wilmington, which supports local community through service projects, artisan events, and works to promote conversation and awareness of the contribution of handmade goods to the community.

Marc Levitt (MSP08)

Marc presented a case study on dealing with congressional constituent e-records at the Congressional Papers Roundtable (CPR) during this year’s Society of American Archivists’ conference in addition to being installed as “chair-elect” for the CPR. He will also be starting a new job in September as Archivist for the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, FL.

Joe Cialdella (MSP09)

Joseph received a fellowship from Arts of Citizenship for work in the Learning and Interpretation Department of the Detroit Institute of Arts, specifically assisting with research and writing for their upcoming exhibit on Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit and creating interpretation for their outdoor sculpture garden. He also had an article published in the spring issue of the Michigan Historical Review titled, “A Landscape of Ruin and Repair: Parks, Potatoes, and Detroit’s Environmental Past.”

He has accepted a position as Program Officer for the Michigan Humanities Council beginning in November, where he will be working with museums and other organizations within the state to implement a grant they received from the Kellogg Foundation.

Andrew Gurstelle (MSP09)

Andrew “starred” in a video co-production by the University of Michigan History Department and University Michigan Museum of Art as a talking head. The video is about the nkisi nkondi on display in the museum’s African gallery. In the video, Andrew talks about how the object’s material properties can be linked to historical events, which gives a richer backstory to the object. The video has been displayed on monitors throughout the museum, as well as in various African studies focused classes.

Kristine Ronan (MSP09)

This summer, Kristine was invited to give a public tour at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in association with its touring exhibition of contemporary Native art, Changing Hands: Art without Reservation, 3: Contemporary Native Art from the Northeast and Southeast. In addition, she has a published peer-reviewed article in museum + society, “Native Empowerment, the New Museology, and the National Museum of the American Indian,” which discusses the National Museum of the American Indian and New Museology practices and theory. Kristine also works as a contract researcher for the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., providing support to the curatorial staff of the upcoming Americans exhibition. Kristine also presented portions of her dissertation research at the University of Oklahoma, Stanford University, and the American Antiquarian Society.

Anna Wieck (MSP09)

This year, Anna presented papers at the 45^th annual meeting of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies in Modena, Italy and at the Congreso Posguerras: 75 Aniversario de la Guerra Civil Española in Madrid, Spain. In addition, she was recipient of a Fulbright grant during the 2013-2014 academic year, during which time she presented her dissertation research regarding Spanish painting of the 1920s and 1930s at the 60^th Annual Fulbright Berlin Seminar and the Spanish Fulbright Commission’s Mid-Year Seminar in Valencia.

Shannon Schmoll (MSP11)

Shannon recently started a new position as Director of the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University. In this position, she has helped with the installation of a brand new Digistar 5 planetarium projection system which greatly expands the Planetarium’s capacity for creating engaging and immersive environments in their domed theater. Shannon has also started looking to build new collaborations across the MSU campus and community that will make the most of this new technology.

Anna Topolska (MSP11)

This past summer, Anna presented her paper, “Memory and the Representation of the Second World War in Post-War Poland: The Case of the Museum of Fort VII in Poznan” and participated at 5th World Congress in Polish Studies at The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences and the University of Warsaw in Poland.