Kudos for Fall 2020

Kudos to…  Ipek Kaynar Rohloff (MSP04) recently contributed to a new book about museum architecture called Contemporary Museum Architecture and Design.  Ipek wrote a chapter called “Planning Art Museums from the Inside-Out.”  Her work was based on her doctoral research and her recent museum consultancy role.

Kudos to…  Erica Lehrer (MSP04) will be the keynote speaker at the upcoming European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities conference, titled Decolonizing Museum Cultures and Collections: Mapping Theory and Practice in East-Central Europe.  This international conference for heritage scholars and practitioners will be held at the University of Warsaw, October 22-23.  She also co-authored a short text published in May 2020 in the American Alliance of Museums web series “Museums and Equity in Times of Crisis.”  The article ponders how museums can engage their communities in critical reflection on the work and purpose of museums as part of COVID-related digital initiatives.

Kudos to…  Medha Tare  (MSP04)  was selected to be a part of the Learning Sciences Exchange Fellowship which is funded through New America and the Jacobs Foundation.  The goals are to work across sectors (research, entertainment, policy, etc.) to enhance the public’s understanding of early childhood research.

Kudos to…  Monica Patterson (MSP07) was recently promoted to Associate Professor at Carleton University’s Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies and has started her second term as Assistant Director of the graduate program in Curatorial Studies.  She also recently published an article titled “Children’s Museology and the COVID-19 Crisis.”

Kudos to…  Lindsay Stern (MSP07) has worked at Etsy for six years, and a year ago she was promoted to Senior Operations Manager for Marketplace Integrity. She now handles the operations work for two teams instead of one. One team handles harmful and illegal content, the other manages intellectual property notices and legal processes.

Kudos to…  Joe Cialdella (MSP09) recently published a book, Motor City Green: A Century of Landscapes and Environmentalism in Detroit.  The book is a history of green spaces in metropolitan Detroit from the late nineteenth- to early twenty-first century. It focuses primarily on the history of gardens and parks in the city of Detroit and its suburbs in southeast Michigan.  The book looks to the past to demonstrate how today’s urban gardens in Detroit evolved from, but are also distinct from, other urban gardens and green spaces in the city’s past.

Kudos to… Sarah Gothie (MSP09) who was recently named Research Associate by the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island.  Sarah’s research focuses on literary pilgrimages inspired by the works of L.M. Montgomery, best known for Anne of Green Gables. The project emerged from Sarah’s 2011 MSP practicum at Green Gables Heritage Place, one of many sites on Prince Edward Island that commemorate Montgomery’s life and works. More information about the “Pages to Pilgrimages” project can be found at www.pages2pilgrimages.org, and on the LMMI’s website here.

Kudos to… Andrew Gurstelle  (MSP09) recently celebrated a five-year milestone in July 2020 as the director of the Museum of Anthropology at Wake Forest University. During this time, he has used what he learned from MSP to grow the university’s student engagement program from just a handful of class visits each year to more than fifty. He has also worked to increase the number of interns working at the museum so that now the majority of exhibits are curated by students. Re-centering the museum’s mission on student engagement demonstrated the value of its core collections and exhibits to the university’s administration, and this led to the decision to move the museum to a larger and completely remodeled space on campus.  Outside of the museum, Andrew was able to increase the offering for a course called “Introduction to Museum Studies,” and it is now a core part of a revitalized Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies minor.

Kudos to…  John Kannenberg (MSP10) was just awarded a PhD from the University of the Arts London.  The title of his thesis is “Listening to Museums: Sounds as objects of culture and curatorial care.”   The thesis presents a detailed account of the development and execution behind the curatorial and artistic strategies that make up the Museum of Portable Sound, an experimental institution that displays sounds as cultural objects.

Kudos to…  Anna Topolska (MSP11) recently published a new article in Visual Studies: The Public Process and Execution of Arthur Greiser in Poznań: Visual Rhetoric of Documentary Photography and Local Memory, in: “Res Rhetorica”, 6 (4) 2019.  Also, she recently translated (from Polish into English) the museum labels and descriptions for 5 historical museums in the city of Poznań, Poland: Wielkopolska Martyrs Museum Fort VII, Museum of ‘Poznan’ Army, Museum of Armaments, Museum of Wielkopolska Uprising 1918-1919, and Museum of Poznań Uprising of June 1956.

Kudos to…  Naomi Priddy (Herman-Aplet) (MSP12) recently relocated back to California to accept a position as Education Director at the California Museum, a history museum in downtown Sacramento.

Kudos to…  Katy Holihan (MSP14) was selected by Rackham in May 2020 as a recipient of this year’s Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award. This well-deserved award recognizes Katy’s excellent teaching, as well as her many contributions to the German department outside of her own classroom. Only 20 awards were given to GSI’s throughout the University of Michigan.

Kudos to…  Allan Martell  (MSP15) began a postdoc at Louisiana State in the School of Information and Library Science.  Here, he will work with a group of US Army veterans on a digital archive project.  He hopes to use this experience to begin research that will explore how the design of information visualizations shapes memory.

Kudos to…  Carolyn Clayton (MSP16) is now a Studios at MASS MoCA Coordinator. She works for a department called Assets for Artists where she runs the artist residency program.

Kudos to…  Christina DiFabio   (MSP16) received a predoctoral fellowship at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Istanbul which she will begin in the 2021-2022 year.

Kudos to…  Grace Mahoney (MSP16) completed her practicum at the Literary Memorial Museum of Mikhail Bulgakov in Kiev.  During her time at the museum, she created the Bolgakov Digital Collection.  This collection was featured in the winter 2020 UM digital library magazine.

Kudos to…  Zoe Ortiz (Jenkins)  (MSP16) recently won a Fulbright Grant to study in Italy at the Vatican Archives.  The title of her project is “Restoring the Restored: Revealing the Role of the Gabii Sculptures from Antiquity to Today.”

Kudos to… Felix Zamora-Gomez (MSP16) was awarded a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship in March which allowed him to stay in Madrid another academic year and continue work on his dissertation.

Kudos to… Stephanie Brown (MSP17) recently accepted a position as a museum board manager for a new up and coming art museum, the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta. This position will allow her to learn about the process of starting an art museum from the ground up.  The position will also allow Stephanie to showcase her own experiences and be able to demonstrate to her colleagues how valuable she can be to the museum and to her local community as a museum professional and instructional designer.

Kudos to…  Alexandra Creola (MSP17) was awarded a Fulbright Research Award to conduct research in Italy in 2020-2021. The title of her project is “Roman Nymphs and the Underworld: Landscape, Religion, and Identity in Southern Italy.”

Kudos to…  Emily Finch (MSP18) began a new position as Scholarly Communications and Copyright Librarian at Kansas State University in February, 2020.

Kudos to…  Aleksandra Kuznetsova (MSP18) is beginning work on a three year postdoctoral NASA Hubble Fellowship Program at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.