Kudos for Summer 2015

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

David Choberka (MSP03)

David is completing his third year as Mellon Academic Coordinator at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. His main responsibility is to increase visits to the museum by university classes. Through his work, the volume and variety of university classes visiting UMMA’s study rooms and galleries has increased dramatically, from 77 classes in 2011-2012 to over 300 in 2014-2015. Over the past academic year, UMMA has hosted over 6000 university students who visited the museum with classes from 10 of the university’s schools or colleges, including 28 different departments in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

Henrike Florusbosch (MSP03)

Henrike will be teaching “Heritage Preservation in a Global Context: Institutional Policies and Practices” in addition to a fieldwork-based honors course on heritage, focusing on the “balancing acts” involved in maintaining cultural and natural heritage.  The class will examine the tensions between the aims of heritage preservation and the perceived limitations that the proclamation of an area as a world heritage site or man-and-biosphere reserve imposes upon the people living in that area.

Luna Khirfan (MSP03)

Luna has recently published World Heritage, Urban Design and Tourism, a new book that builds on her thesis work that focused on world heritage cities in the Middle East.

Michael Andre (MSP04)

Michael continues to work as a translator in Mountain View, California. He has just completed an English manuscript of the current guide to the Goethe Residence, for the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, where he did his MSP internship.  He awaits publication of his translation of the book accompanying the current exhibition “Lebensfluten – Tatensturm” in the Goethe National Museum. He is also collaborating with colleagues in Weimar on the third installment of the English-German “Werkverzeichnis Henry van de Velde,” and he has begun work with art historians in the U.S. and Ireland on the first translation into English of the large body of van de Velde’s own writings (originally in French, German, and Dutch).

Lydia Herring-Harrington (MSP04)

Lydia has recently been hired as the Electronic Resources and Metadata Services Librarian at Tufts University’s Tisch Library.

Erica Lehrer (MSP04)

Erica’s edited volume, Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland (2015), has recently been published, and this fall, “Curating Ambivalence: An Interview with Erica Lehrer, Concordia University,” will be published in September’s issue of American Anthropologist. In addition, in September 2015, Erica will be giving a workshop, “Curating Memories in Conflict: Exhibiting and Filming Poland’s Jewish Figurines,” at the Visual Anthropology and European Cultural Heritage conference in Warsaw, Poland.

Heloise Finch-Boyer (MSP05)

In the U.K. Heloise works as the grants manager at Leyton Consulting, helping science and technology companies to obtain government funding for innovation.

Leah Niederstadt (MSP05)

Leah recently co-published an article on object-based learning and blended learning in the classroom, which was published in an online (peer reviewed) journal called Transformations. Additionally, Leah’s students produced an exhibition, titled “Tracing the Thread,” which was curated as part of her fall 2014 exhibition design course, positively reviewed in ArtSource magazine.

Tamara Shreiner (MSP06)

Tammy recently began a position as an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Grand Valley State University.  As an instructor for social studies education courses, she hopes to take advantage of the multiple museums and museum resources in the Grand Rapids community.  This summer, Tammy participated in a two-week fellowship program to design educational resources for the Edsel & Eleanor Ford House and the Henry Ford Estate.

Christopher Berk (MSP07)

Chris recently accepted a one-year anthropology position at Auburn University’s Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, where he will be teaching multiple sections of “Introduction to Anthropology,” as well as an original course. His article, “This Exhibition Is about Now: Tasmanian Aboriginality at the Museum,” will soon be published in Museum Anthropology.

Alice Goff (MSP07)

Alice finished her PhD and graduated from University of California, Berkeley, in May 2015. She has begun a post-doc this fall at UM as part of the Michigan Society of Fellows in the departments of German and History.

Monica Huerta (MSP07)

Monica is currently working as a Sales Enablement Specialist for a startup called Glassdoor, located in the San Francisco Bay Area. She creates e-learnings for internal and external audiences to educate them on Glassdoor products, services, and value. Using her MSP skills, Monica is essentially curating learning for the Glassdoor company. She previously held a Teaching Consultant/Instructional Designer position at the University of Washington, Seattle, and worked as a contract Instructional Designer for the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning at Stanford University.

Lindsay Stern (MSP07)

Lindsay works at Etsy as a Marketplace Integrity Agent.  This summer, Lindsay also participated in a three-person exhibition at a local artist run space called KMOCA in Kingston, NY.

Aimee VonBokel (MSP08)

Aimee is currently working in New York on a digital humanities project relating to the Weeksville Heritage Center, which happens to be one of the subjects of her dissertation. Additionally, she founded the Museum Studies Alumni Association at NYU and it has just completed its first successful year of programming. Aimee taught a summer course at Washington University in June on historic sites, titled “Decoding Historic Landscapes.” Next spring, she hopes to teach a digital humanities practicum (designed around her work with Weeksville Heritage Center). In addition to gathering a panel to present at the National Council on Public History, she also presented at Social Science History Museum in Toronto, as well as the Urban History Museum at the University of Pennsylvania.

Anna Wieck (MSP09)

Anna has been awarded a graduate curatorial internship at the National Gallery of Art for the 2015-2016 academic year, where she will work in the Department of Photography. She recently contributed an essay to the catalog for a forthcoming exhibition (planned for 2017) on the artist Josep Maria Sert (1874-1945) which will take place at the Fundación Juan March in Madrid. In April 2015, Anna was a co-organizer of the Tradition and Transition Conference in the Spanish Avant-Garde, which took place at the University of Michigan and was co-sponsored by MSP.

John Kannenberg (MSP10)

In February 2015, John gave a performance of two classic Fluxus event scores, “Water Music” by Mieko Shiomi and “Water (1964)” by Yoko Ono at the White Cube gallery in London as part of Christian Marclay’s solo exhibition; this performance was featured in the New York Times review of the exhibition. In addition, two of John’s drawings, depicting the sounds inside the Tate Britain and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, were accepted for publication in the Manifest International Drawing Annual INDA 10, which is to be published later this year by Cincinnati’s Manifest Gallery. He also presented a sound piece, a recording of John Cage’s 4’33,” recorded inside an anechoic chamber, at the Silence and Music workshop convened at the Royal College of Music by the Science Museum in London. It was the first in a series of three workshops to discuss ideas for an upcoming exhibition at the Science Museum on music and technology He also presented his paper, “Cultural Heritage in the Age of 3D Printing,” at the Arts in Society Conference at the Imperial College London in July.

Jenny Kreiger (MSP11)

Jenny is currently conducting dissertation research in Naples, Italy, on a Fulbright grant, and it was recently announced that she won a Rome Prize, which will allow her to continue her work at the American Academy in Rome for the next two years. Her dissertation is tentatively titled, “The Business of Commemoration: A Comparative Study of Italian Catacombs;” it examines catacombs in Rome, Naples, and Syracuse in order to learn about the economic aspects of funerary practice in late antique urban contexts.

Kayla Romberger (MSP11)

Kayla is currently lecturing in the Fine Arts department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teach courses on printmaking, independent publications, and artists books.

Shannon Schmoll (MSP11)

Shannon was accepted in the Astronomy in Chile Educator Ambassador Program (ACEAP) as part of the first cohort to visit three major observatories in Chile in June 2015. Through the program, she was able to get behind-the-scenes access to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory CTIO, and the Gemini Observatory, along with eight other astronomy educators.

Alisha Wessler (MSP11)

Alisha has been working with the School of Visual Arts in Belgrade, Serbia. She also recently exhibited a new body of work at the Smack Mellon in Brooklyn.

Naomi Herman-Aplet (MSP12)

Naomi accepted a position at Chicago’s Field Museum in April 2015, where she serves as Social Studies Instructional Design Specialist. She is working from the ground up to develop materials for social studies instruction that parallel the already existing resources for science education.

Diana Sierra Becerra (MSP12)

Diana recently provided an audiovisual training at the International Coalition Sites of Conscience Regional Middle East and North Africa Conference, in Rabat, Morocco. This training drew from the pedagogical methods of the Salvadoran museum where she had previously worked and facilitated participants through a process of addressing the needs of their prioritized audience via a specific project (which they developed). She is also heading up a new project, called Museum without Walls.

Marisa Szpytman (MSP12)

Marisa continues to work as Assistant Registrar at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She recently coordinated loans for the exhibition “Make a Joyful Noise: Renaissance Art and Music at Florence Cathedral.” Through this, Marisa had the opportunity to work with museum professionals in Florence and at the High Museum in Atlanta.

Caroline Braden (MSP13)

Caroline recently began work in the newly created position of Guest Accessibility/Special Needs Assistant at The Henry Ford. She also organized and chaired a panel discussion entitled “Welcoming All Visitors: Enhancing Access and Inclusion” at the Association of Midwest Museums Conference in Cincinnati. In addition, she presented a session entitled “Creating and Implementing a Visitor Accessibility Plan at Institutions Small and Large” at this fall’s Michigan Museums Association Conference.

Amanda Respess (MSP14)

Amanda has been in Chicago celebrating the opening of the Field Museum’s new Cyrus Tang Hall of China, an exhibit she worked on before starting graduate school. She is currently writing a short section on Chinese medicine for the book that will be published by the museum and the University of Chicago for the exhibit opening, and she also has revisions underway for a book chapter on the medical epistemology and trade for McGill’s Indian Ocean World Centre. She continues to work on the Green Hornet anniversary exhibit for the Stearns Collection, which will feature an open house in January 2016.