Matthew Bailey, a second year Ph.D. candidate in Art History and a Lynn Cooper Harvey Fellow in American Culture Studies, is focusing on twentieth century American art with interests in Latin American modernism and avant-garde theory. Working for the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University this past summer as part of an internship fellowship, Matt wrote website entries for twenty selections from the permanent collection and is currently researching and writing catalogue entries for artworks to be included in the forthcoming "Reality Bites" exhibition of contemporary german art to be held at the university museum. In addition, he will be presenting a paper at the annual Nineteenth Century French Studies conference this fall in Austin, Texas entitled "The Battlefields of Representation," which discusses parodies of salon paintings in French political caricature during the early years of the July Monarchy.

Sara Phillips de Borja is a Ph.D. student with interests in nineteenth-century European art and seventeenth-century Dutch art. In Spring 2005, she taught a course on seventeenth-century Dutch art at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. She will return there in Fall 2005 to teach a two-week intensive course on French art to a group of studio art students who will be traveling to France for five weeks.

Noelle Bradley is beginning her second year of Ph.D. coursework. She spent her summer learning German translation and recently returned from a brief but exhilarating trip to Paris. This October she will present her paper, "Masks that Reveal: Social Inequality in J.J. Grandville's Les Métamorphoses du jour at the International Comic Arts Festival held at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

Mary Reid Brunstrom is a second year masters student in the art history program. Her interests are twentieth century art and architecture and her thesis subject is nineteen-thirties modernist architecture in St. Louis. In 2004, Mary completed a Masters in Liberal Arts in Washington University. Her thesis entitled "From Twain to Joe: Serra in St. Louis," is essentially a reception study of Richard Serra's public sculpture, Twain, which is located in downtown St. Louis.

Nicci Cobb is a first year Masters student in the Department of the History of Art and a Graduate Certificate Candidate in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. She did her Bachelor’s work at nearby Saint Louis University and graduated with a degree in Literature with an Emphasis in Women’s Studies and Minors in Art History and Theology. Recently, she traveled to Reno, Nevada to present a paper for the Annual Conference of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender. She has presented with the organization in the past and will assist in organizing the 2006 conference that will convene in St. Louis, Missouri. Current research interests include contemporary installation art, 19th century textile work, media representations of the female body and issues of sexuality and gender in the history of art. Outside of school, she is an avid quilter, knitter and crotchetier, is involved with the culinary arts society and volunteers regularly with the Animal Protective Agency of Missouri.

Maya Fujikawa took “sabbatical” leave after obtaining a Master’s degree in art history from Washington University in 2001. During her absence she presented a paper entitled “Saints and Salvation in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment” at the Central Renaissance Conference in Emporia, Kansas, and later interned at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy, where she gave a presentation on “Peggy’s Patronage of Jackson Pollock.” The more leisurely pursuits of eating sushi, gardening, and chatting with her family and friends in Japan refreshed and energized her. Mayu came back to the University last year to embark upon her doctoral studies. Motivated more than ever, she is now studying Venetian art, Rembrandt, and the art of Japan, while throwing all the rest of her enthusiasm into her T.A. duties.

Caroline Hillard joined the program at Washington University and is now a third year Ph.D. student in Italian Renaissance art after completing a Master’s in art history at Syracuse University in Florence. Carrie’s research interests include Michelangelo, the role of antiquity in the Renaissance, and anatomical illustration. She has also developed an interest in Greek and Roman art, and in January she presented a paper at the Archaeological Institute of America’s annual meeting in San Francisco. She is currently busy with course work and her duties as a teaching assistant.

Ling-yu Hung is a third year Ph.D. student of the archeological program in the Department. After finishing her course work, she is on her way to take the comprehensive exams now. Also, she is doing Japanese and enjoys being a TA for the department this semester. Last summer, she presented a paper entitled "Decoration Analysis and Social Units" a Case Study of Fish-motifs on Yangshao Pottery? at the Worldwide Conference of the Society for East Asian Archaeology (SEAA) in Daejeon, South Korea. In the future, she will keep focus on studying the mechanism and process leading to the emergence of socially complexity in Late Neolithic northern China, specifically founded on the analysis of a noticeable cultural characteristic---painted pottery, which was widespread in the Yellow River Basin from so-called Yangshao Culture to Xindian culture. From the perspective of production and utilization, she would like to explore questions about craft specialization, social stratification, human interaction and the role of painted pottery played in these processes.

Elliott Zooey Martin, set to graduate in December 2005, is writing her Master’s thesis on Gordon Matta-Clark. The highlight of this was the time spent researching at the Matta-Clark archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal. She recently published “Felix Gonzalez-Torres and the Interrogation of the Public Sphere,” in the 2005 issue of the Chicago Art Journal.

Sarah McGavran spent a year between college and graduate school in Göppingen, Germany on a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship. During her time as an assistant teacher for English at a German high school she realized that she was not yet ready to give up being a student herself. Sarah pursued her interest in German art during the first year of her M.A. studies, writing seminar papers on Albrecht Dürer, a nineteenth-century German caricaturist and a contemporary German woman sculptor. Experiencing a bit of German overload, she spent the summer learning how to read French. Her ongoing obsession and new endeavor converge in her master’s thesis on the German Expressionist artists Paula Modersohn-Becker and Gabriele Münter in Paris.

Michael J. Murphy holds a bachelor's degree in art history from the University of Iowa and a master's degree from Washington University. He is completing a dissertation under the direction of Professor Miller entitled "White Collared: Fashioning Manliness in American Visual Culture, c.1830-1920." He currently teaches courses on masculinities for the University's Women and Gender Studies Program. In Spring 2005 he delivered the Stella Blum Research Grant Lecture at the annual meeting of the Costume Society of America. An edited version of that talk will be published in the Society's annual journal Dress in 2006.

Diana Towle spent the month of October in Paris, beginning her dissertation research on “Japonisme: Representations of Nature and Women in the Art of Bracquemond, Degas, Cassat, and Van Gogh, 1866-1891.” While in Paris, she braved the institutional bureaucracy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, met a famous artist in order to help Professor Rebecca DeRoo with a current project, and reveled in the glories of the Musée D’Orsay, the Louvre, the Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Marmottan.

Atsushi Yoshida's article, "Fra Angelico's 'Madonna delle Ombre': Colloquies and Soliloquies in Sacra Conversazione" appeared in Bulletin of Cultural Studies (Spring, 2005). The article highlights the culture of asceticism that was integral to the Dominican Observance in the fifteenth century, and proposes a new way of conceiving of sacra conversazione imagery through an examination of the fluid aspects of time and space embodied in Fra Angelico's famous altarpiece at San Marco, and more significantly, the "Ombre," which the artist depicted in clausura in the clerics' dormitory.