Matthew Bailey, a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and a Lynn Cooper Harvey Fellow in American Culture Studies, is focusing on twentieth-century American art, European modernist painting, and art of the Latin American avant-garde, with particular interests in issues of materiality and visuality in modernist painting. Bailey’s recent projects including writing for the exhibition catalogue Reality Bites: Making Avant-Garde Art in Post-Wall Germany, and is currently writing for the catalogue The Art of Two Germanies during the Cold War. He is the 2005 recipient of the Naomi Schor Memorial Award for the outstanding graduate student essay at the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Conference, as well as the 2006 recipient of the Daniel Walden Award for Best Graduate Paper at the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Studies Association Conference.

Clara Barnhart is a third year Ph.D. student in the Department, and a Lynn Cooper Harvey Fellow in the American culture studies department. She researches nineteenth and twentieth century American art and culture, focusing on the interplay of varying visual developments and cultural transformation. This past April she presented “Animating the Inanimate: Representations of Commodities in the Early Twentieth Century by Everett Shinn and Gene Carr” at the Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association’s national conference in Boston. Her forthcoming article, “Reconciling the Civil War in Winslow Homer’s Undertow,” will be published in Athanor. She is currently preparing to take her comprehensive exams in the spring of 2008.

Emilie Boone is a second year master's student in the department of Art History interested in issues of race and representation in twentieth century American art. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Emilie has enjoyed her return to school after working in Japan and Boston. She looks forward to her upcoming thesis work, participating in the Speaker Series Committee, and attending the Association of African American Museums' Annual Conference as a Burroughs-Wright Fellow.

Noelle Paulson Bradley is beginning work on her dissertation, entitled "The Human Animal: Anthropomorphic Animals in Print and Paint, c. 1820-50." In 2007 she received the Walter Read Hovey Fellowship from the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Houghton Library Joan Nordell Fellowship from Harvard University to facilitate research on this project. She recently presented papers at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference in Durham, U.K., the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States Conference in Malibu, CA, and the Midwest Art History Society's annual conference in Indianapolis, IN. This fall she will give a paper on Sir Edwin Landseer's dogs in mourning at the Southeastern College Art Conference in Charleston, WV.

Mary Reid Brunstrom is a second year PhD student. Her area of interest is early modernist architecture. Her dissertation research will build on her master's thesis entitled Modern in St. Louis: 1930's Modernist Architects and Their Clients. Prior to this, she completed a Master's in Liberal Arts at Washington University with a thesis on Richard Serra's public sculpture, Twain, located on the Mall in downtown St. Louis. 

Emily Burns is beginning her first year of Ph.D coursework, after two years post M.A, which she spent teaching high school and college art history and working as the Archivist of American art in the Department of Image Collections at the National Gallery of Art. She holds a B.A. from Union College in Schenectady, NY, and an M.A. from The George Washington University. She spent the summer of 2007 working at the New York Historical Society, researching their vast collection of paintings by Asher B. Durand, and writing wall labels for the upcoming Ashcan School exhibition. In the fall, Emily will be giving a paper at the Popular Culture Association Conference in Philadelphia titled " Constructing "America's Hostess": Dolley Madison & Margaret Bayard Smith", which relates to her M.A. thesis research on portraits of Dolley Madison. Her current research interests include portraiture, women natural history illustrators and flower painters, and early twentieth-century American modernism. 

Bryna Campbell is a second year Ph.D. student focusing on twentieth-century American art, and a Lynn Cooper Harvey Fellow in American Culture Studies.  After completing the on-location course, "The Mississippi River, From Confluence to Katrina" in June, she spent the rest of the summer learning Spanish. In spring 2007, she presented two papers: "Agribusiness, Corporate Identity, and Farm Labor Activism: Subversive Interventions in the Work of Ester Hernandez," at that AHA Symposium at Indiana University; and "Archaeological Adventures in the American West: Gustaf Nordenskiold, Tourism, and Photographing Mesa Verde," at the annual Florida State University Symposium. She is developing this second paper into an article entitled, "Excavating the Subjective in Gustaf Nordenskiöld's 'The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde,'" for Athanor this fall.  In addition, she will be doing in an internship this fall in the Department of American Art at the St Louis Art Museum.

Nicci Cobb is completing her M.A. degree in the Department of Art History and Archeology with a Graduate Certificate in Women's and Gender Studies.  Her Thesis work considers Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias and relies upon disciplines of art history, history of medieval medicine and gender studies.  Last fall Nicci helped to plan the annual conference for the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender at which she regularly presents.  She also presents annually at the National Women’s Studies Association.  She has served on the Graduate Student Senate, ProGRADS Committee and Graduate Professional Council at Washington University.  Last Spring she had the pleasure of co-chairing the Graduate Student Symposium held annually at Washington University.     

Mayu Fujikawa spent the 2006-07 academic year in Prato, Italy researching material for her dissertation, which explores the influence of pilgrimage upon Renaissance art. She is currently finishing her dissertation and preparing a paper for the 2008 Renaissance Society of America's conference.

Caroline Hillard completed her MA in Italian Renaissance Art at Syracuse University in 2002 and is now a PhD candidate at Washington University. Her dissertation, “The Etruscans in Renaissance Italy: Reception, Representation, and Invention,” explores Etruscan antiquity as a Renaissance construct shaped by politics, regional identity, and archaeological discovery. She has presented her research at various venues, most recently at the Renaissance Society of America. An article, “The Conquest of Etruria in Francesco Salviati’s Triumph of Camillus,” will appear in Athanor in 2008. Hillard has also published in the field of medieval and Renaissance anatomy, a long-time interest of hers. She has received fellowships from the Kress Foundation, the Pittsburgh Foundation, and Washington University.

Ling-yu Hung is a Ph.D. student with research interests in East Asian archaeology. In year 2006, she and her colleague published a paper, "New light on Taiwan highland prehistory" in IPPA (the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association) Bulletin 26. Recently, she joins Professor Gwen Bennett’s archaeological project in Sichuan province in China and works on her dissertation project in Northwestern China, regarding ceramic specialization and social change in late Neolithic period. In the summer of year 2008, she will present a paper entitled "Painted pottery and long distance trade in late Neolithic Northwestern China." at the fourth Worldwide Conference of the Society for East Asian Archaeology in Beijing, China.

Theresa Huntsman worked for two years in the Kranzberg Art and Architecture Library and taught courses in archaeology for University College after completeing her MA in 2005. Theresa has returned to the department to pursue her PhD. She continues her work with the Etruscan archaeological site of Poggio Civitate near Siena, Italy, and has contributed to two online publications: "An Archaic Period Well from Poggio Civitate (Murio" in 2002 and "Center and Periphery in Inland Eturia: Poggio Civitate and the Etruscan Settlement in Vescovado di Murio" in 2007. She spent the spring of 2008 preparing full catalog entries for the collection of ancient vases owned by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum to be presented on the museum's website in the near future.

Jodi Kovach is a Ph.D. candidate currently writing a dissertation on baroque tendencies in the work of several contemporary artists of Latin American origins. In March she presented a paper representing one facet of this topic at the Midwest Art History Society Annual Conference entitled Apparitions of Mérida: Jorge Pardo’s Baroque Evocations of Place in a London Gallery. Over the past year she has contributed to the exhibition catalogues The Geometry of Hope: Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (Blanton Museum of Art, 2007) and Reality Bites: Making Avant-Garde Art in Post-Wall Germany (Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2007). She is currently writing interpretive texts on artworks to be included in the forthcoming publication for the exhibition The Art of the Two Germanys during the Cold War at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Stephanie Lovett joined the department in January 2007. Her field of research is medieval art with a focus on the eastern Mediterranean world and a special interest in the diverse artistic cultures along the Silk Road. Her research focuses on portable objects and inter-cultural exchange, particularly Eurasian nomadism and diplomatic gift exchange. Stephanie aspires to a museum career and has complemented her coursework with an internship at the Saint Louis Art Museum and summer projects with the Kemper Art Museum and the Campbell House Museum in downtown St. Louis. She spent August 2007 in St. Petersburg, Russia where she participated in an intensive study program examining the Eurasian collections of the State Hermitage Museum.

Sarah McGavran, a second year Ph.D. student, spent a year in southwest Germany on a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship before beginning graduate studies in art history. She traveled back to Germany in January 2006 to conduct primary research at the Gabriele Münter-und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, for her master’s thesis, “A Studio of One’s Own: Paula Modersohn-Becker and Gabriele Münter in Paris 1906-7.” This spring, she presented a paper at the History of Art Graduate Student Symposium at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, on literary translation and art history, focusing on Rainer Maria Rilke’s homage to Modersohn-Becker, “Requiem for a Friend.” Her interest in traveling artists, crosscurrents in modern French and German art, nationalism and gender also informed recent projects, which included Edvard Munch and nineteenth-century German painting and the influence of Eugène Delacroix on Paul Gauguin’s conception of the female nude. Having spent the past two summers learning French, Sarah recently spent a week in Paris studying nineteenth-century French art. Her trip would not have been complete without a stop in Bremen, Germany, where she researched the work of Paula Modersohn-Becker.

Emily Olson will begin her first year in the Art History and Archaeology graduate program at Washington University in the fall of 2007. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Arizona Summa Cum Laude and with Honors in December of 2006. Part of her undergraduate studies included a semester abroad in the beautiful Italian town of Orvieto. She also completed a senior thesis on museum education which was based upon her three summer internships at the Field Museum in Chicago. Her interests are primarily in Etruscan, Greek, and Roman art and architecture, but she is also interested in how these Classical influences were later manifested in the Renaissance.

Christine A. Smith holds a bachelor’s degree in history and classical studies from Loyola University in New Orleans and a master’s degree in classical archaeology from Washington University. She is completing a dissertation in Fall 2007, under the direction of Professor Rotroff entitled “Controlling Miasma: The Evidence for Cult Practices of Greek Craftspeople from the Archaic through the Hellenistic Period (6th-2nd c. BCE). She currently teaches courses for University College in Classics on ancient religion and on women in antiquity. In January 2008, she will present a paper at the Archaeological Institute of America’s annual meeting on ash altars in ancient Greece.

Erin Sutherland is beginning her second year as a Ph.D. student in art history. She began the Washington University program after finishing a BA in art history at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia and a master’s in art history at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Previous work with the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC and at the Denver Art Museum inspired her to pursue an internship at the Saint Louis Art Museum in the spring of 2007. Her primary research interests include Michelangelo, the Italian Renaissance and Roman antiquity. After a summer of studying French and conducting research on works by Harriet Hosmer, Erin looks forward to her continuing course work and serving as a teaching assistant. Although St. Louis has quickly won her over, Erin is eager to get back to Italy soon for hands-on research.

Diane Towle is currently writing her dissertation, "Spaces of Japonisme and the Art of Whistler, Van Gogh, and Monet." She took part this summer in a Mellon Dissertation Seminar on History and Memory sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature. She is also participating in a support group for dissertation-writing graduate students in our department, and looking forward to upcoming research trips. She will go to Washington, D.C., to further her research on Whistler at the Library of Congress and the archives of the Freer-Sackler Gallery, and to Paris, where she will round off her research on nineteenth-century Japonisme, supported by research grants from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Art History and Archaeology.

Anna Warbelow is a second year PhD candidate in Art History focusing on contemporary art and theory with a special interest in conceptual photography. Anna received her Masters in Art History form the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she also worked as a curatorial intern at the Smith College Museum of Art. Last year she presented a paper on the American photographer Anne Brigman at the 33rd Annual Cleveland Symposium at Case Western University. Anna's busy summer included learning German, taking Dr. Gerry Izenberg's Mellon Seminar on Identity, and participating in a symposium on "Portrait/Homage/Embodiment" at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. The Mellon Seminar was particularly helpful for Anna's progress towards her dissertation prospectus as was her research trip to New York City where she interviewed contemporary photographer Nikki S. Lee and her representing gallery owner Leslie Tonkonow.

Elissa Weichbrodt is a second year Masters student in contemporary art and theory with particular interests in post-colonialism, feminism, and art about memory and trauma. This past year she presented her paper "Reclaiming Paradise: Patronage of Hawaiian Landscape Painting as a Means of Cultural Resistance" at Indiana University's Art History Graduate Student Symposium.  She spent her summer learning to translate German and continuing research -- in Hawaii and New York -- for her thesis on Lynne Yamamoto, a contemporary Japanese-American installation artist. This coming fall she will be working as a research assistant for the upcoming exhibition "On the Margins" at the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum. When not burrowing in the graduate reading room or planning the 2007-2008 Graduate Speaker Series, Elissa enjoys hiking, cooking, and discovering new restaurants.