Graduate Student Highlights

ARHU has selected Zoe as one of five graduate students that they will support to participate in the National Humanities Center (NHC) and Digital Humanities Center at San Diego State University's Podcasting for Humanities Graduate Students: Storytelling for a Modern Audience from January 8–12, 2024.  

Yanzhang (Tony) Cui was selected to receive a James F. Harris Visionary Scholarship for the 2023-2024 academic year. Among all of the outstanding applications ARHU received, three were selected. The committee was truly impressed with the depth of commitment you have shown and the “visionary” quality of your engagement with others on behalf of the arts and humanities. The Fellowships Committee is very pleased to be able to support your excellent work. 

Juliet Huang has been awarded a Kress History of Art Institutional Fellowship affiliated with the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) that will commence September 2024 and allow her to study in the Netherlands until September 2026. This fellowship will support research for her dissertation “Dressing the Speaking Hand: Fashion Accessories around the Hand in the 17th-Century Netherlands.” This dissertation explores the meaningfulness of clothing the hand in Dutch mercantile society using an object-based, process-oriented approach. Rather than treating the fashion accessories around the hand as mere symbols of wealth, status, or marriage, Juliet will conduct first-hand object analyses to see how gloves were actively used in marriage and familial settings to convey emotions and materialize memories. Analyzing surviving historical material may yield important insights of objects’ production technique and tactile qualities including weight and texture. Through the prism of materiality in combination with visual representations, Juliet's dissertation explores how fashion could enact social distinction for the Dutch middle-class elites and allowed for their creativity, experimentation, and transgression. 

JooHee received an ARHU conference travel award in support of her paper presentation at The College Art Association of America (CAA)’s Annual conference. Title of Lecture/Paper/Presentation:
Self-portrait in Liminal Space: Mo Bahc’s Fast After Thanksgiving Day (1984)
Participating in the CAA conference, a premier gathering for art professionals, presents a valuable
opportunity for me to engage with peers and experts across various art disciplines. This experience will
not only be instrumental in refining my dissertation topic but also in forging connections that could lead
to future career opportunities. My research, which critically reexamines the concept of self-portraiture
among contemporary Asian diaspora artists, aligns closely with the session's focus. Specifically, my
analysis of Mo Bahc’s Fast After Thanksgiving Day (1984) challenges and broadens traditional
perceptions of self-portraiture and identity, particularly in the context of diaspora Asian artists.

Melanie Nguyen has been named a Tyson Scholar at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art for spring 2024. This allows her a full-time residency in Bentonville, Arkansas to work on her dissertation, “Embodied Ecologies: Performance Art and Environmentalism, 1970-1990." 

Noriko received an ARHU conference travel award for The Materiality of Resistance, a two-day symposium from March 7 to March 8, 2024, exploring the artistic deployment of materials as tools to imagine, promote, and enact resistance to the status quo in American art and visual culture. Hosted by History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC) program at
California College of the Arts (CCA) and made possible with support from the Terra Foundation for
American Art, the event will convene writers, artists, designers, curators, and archivists to consider
historical and contemporary stories where the materiality of making contributes to socio-cultural
change.

Title of Lecture/Paper/Presentation:
Saburo Hasegawa and His Students at California College of Arts and Crafts

This research sheds light on the overlooked aspects of U.S. art history, and the conference will provide
me with an opportunity to present my research in public. The intersection of Hasegawa and the actual
impact of Hasegawa’s teaching at CCAC have not been thoroughly analyzed before. Also, there is no
academic article written about Noriko Yamamoto. I have worked at Saburo Hasegawa Memorial Gallery
in Japan, and been in touch with Yamamoto's family to study their private collections for a few years. I
hope the research will make a part of my dissertation or more extensive essay in future

Chao Chi received an ARHU Travel grant in support of his attendance at the conference Global East: Japanese Cultural Entanglements, which will take place in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem between November 14th and 16th, 2023. This conference is an international collaboration between Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, and the Japan Art History Forum with the support of Toshiba International Foundations. The focus of this conference is on the cultural flows, interconnectedness, and interactions between the different regions that compose the Global East, which include East Europe, East Mediterranean, and East Asia. The conference welcomes research papers that look at cross-regional cultural and artistic exchanges within the Global East with Japan as a central point of reference. Presentations were reviewed based on how well they contributed to scholarly understanding of Japan’s interactions with the Global East. Examples of papers that the committee looks for include those that challenge ideas of race, gender, class, and traditional notions of culture and identity; papers that highlight the implication of cultural entanglements for contemporary discussions go globalization and cultural exchange; and finally, papers about the flow of art and culture beyond national boundaries.

At this conference, Chao Chi presented a section of his ongoing research titled Painting Walls as Bridges: Modern Japanese Buddhist Murals in the Context of Cultural Exchanges between Japan and Asia. 

Juliet received an ARHU conference travel award for her participation in the ICOM Costume annual conference 2023 Type of Conference: International Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland 9/24-9/27/2023
Title of presentation: To wear to not to wear: black masks and luxury shopping in 17th- century England
Her presentation examined issues relating to women's self-fashioning through the deployment of black half masks in 17th-century England. Costume historians have examined the use masks in theatrical settings, but here she considers the everyday fashion of wearing black masks from the perspective of consumer culture in London, which is an aspect that has not been sufficiently discussed before.
This conference was a great opportunity for her to not only share her own research with fashion historians and museum professionals from all over the world, but also to learn more about the latest research progress in the field.

My trip to the Netherlands was filled with discovery and inspiration. I stayed in Leiden, home of the oldest university in Holland and the artists Rembrandt and Jan Lievens. In the first few days of my trip, I visited Leiden’s Municipal Archives. There I accessed hundreds of contemporary documents relating to Leiden’s hofjes. Among these documents I encountered foundational decrees for hofjes in last wills and testaments, construction plans for these structures, and in some cases illustrated family trees that helped me confirm founder’s identities and their relationships through art patronage to Rembrandt and Lievens. I also spent several days in the Leiden University Library. There, I checked out and read or scanned all the books and articles that I could find that discussed Leiden’s hofjes. Since my return, these sources have helped me write a new chapter on Leiden’s hofjes and their connections to Rembrandt and Lievens’ images of elderly women. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I was able to conduct a self-led walking tour of Leiden’s hofjes. Experiencing these places was essential to my ability to write about them.

I also ventured outside of Leiden on three occasions. In Utrecht I visited the Centraal Museum and the Museum Catharijneconvent. I was also fortunate enough to make my way to Amsterdam twice. On my first trip I spent several hours in the Rijksmuseum and their Print Room where I studied etchings of elderly women by Rembrandt and Lievens. There I also met up with Ilona van Tuinen, Curator of 16th and 17th century Prints and Drawings at the Rijksmuseum. On my second visit to Amsterdam, I met Ariadne Schmidt a social historian at the Eye Film Museum. Together we discussed the social history of early modern women for several hours and she pointed me in the direction of a number of helpful sources. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to do so much on my journey to the Netherlands. The research I acquired and the connections I made give me a great deal of confidence in the final stages of this program.

With a Summer Research Travel Fellowship, I was able to spend Summer 2023 in northern Greece on the island Samothrace with the American Excavations Samothrace team. I fulfilled many roles: I filled in as Co-Registrar in the beginning of the season; I participated in excavation within the Sanctuary of the Great Gods and in a suspected city wall gate; and I worked on understanding the chronological phases and use contexts of two areas in preparation for publication.

My primary focus was investigating the history of the Stoa terrace before the building’s construction and the various use contexts. This process involved reviewing and clarifying the various levels and contexts of discovered features (including the suspected natural hillside and bedrock) of previous excavations from the 1960s. We began to understand the early history of the hill, pulling some objects (mostly ceramics) from these contexts to be expertised and studied by our Finds Experts. In the upcoming year and next season, we will continue to investigate and identify the various contexts with the goal of developing a chapter about the history of the hill for the forthcoming publication on the Stoa.

My other area of focus was in the ‘Lower Stoa’ area packed with dining facilities near the Central Sanctuary, most of which date to the Roman use period of the Sanctuary. I began to articulate the various chronological phases of the buildings which included Hellenistic structures, Roman-period destruction (intentional and not), and Roman (re)construction and renovation.

This work will continue over the upcoming year and into next summer.

With a Summer Research Travel Fellowship, I was able to see and document the newly found material of Japanese-American artist Noriko Yamamoto (1925-2022) at her daughter’s house in Poughkeepsie, NY. I drove to Poughkeepsie from College Park on Monday, July 17th, stayed in Poughkeepsie until Friday, July 21st, and drove back to College Park on that day.

The papers and artworks were not very well organized, but the daughter shared everything she could at that point, and we went through the materials together. There were Yamamoto’s early prints that she made while she was in San Francisco in the mid-1950s, several letters from Hiroshi Teshigahara and other artists, and her father’s materials that show the significant cultural influence Yamamoto received.

Most of the original prints had labels so now the works match the listings in the exhibition brochures. Details of the image conveyed messages that I had never thought of. These findings reveal her early interest in Christianity as her subject, which is different from her later ones, as well as the development of her visual language. The letters and papers suggest her close friendship with Japanese intellectuals and artists at that time, and their possible influence on each other.

Hannah Prescott was named a Kress Pre-Doctoral Fellow and has since September 2023 been supporting research related to the Dutch Textile Trade Project--a digital humanities platform that explores the circulation of globally-sourced textiles on Dutch ships around the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her work focuses on transcribing Dutch shipping records from the Zeeland Archives in Middelburg that identify textiles exported from the Netherlands to West Africa and the Americas on ships directed by the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie (MCC) between 1699-1780. The MCC played a critical role in transporting commodities and enslaved peoples across European trading posts and colonies in the Atlantic world. Under the direction of the Dutch Textile Trade's leaders--Professor Carrie Anderson (Middlebury College) and Dr. Marsely Kehoe (independent scholar)--Hannah has also been contributing original scholarship to the project's Visual Textile Glossary, and compiling data for visual models that help to clarify the types of textiles deemed most critical to the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century. Her research from this fellowship will inform a chapter of her dissertation, Interweaving the Local and the Global: Linen and the Dutch Republic during the Long Seventeenth Century.

Gabrielle Tillenburg was named Curatorial Assistant of Latino Art st the National Portrait Gallery on a one-year contract. In that capacity, Gabrielle supports the Curator of Painting and Sculpture and Latino Art in exhibition research, cataloguing existing collections of Latinx artists and sitters, and assisting in acquisitions of Latinx artists and sitters.

Lillian received  the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship in Fall of 2023 to complete writing her Dissertation:  In Her Image: Representing Women Artists in Modern Japan, 1900-1930. Lillian will defend in Spring of 2024.