Alumni

SMU Art History majors, MA's, and PhD's go on to continue with their studies in advanced graduate programs, as well as into paid positions at museums, galleries, and in the private sector. Recent alumni work at organizations including the Getty Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, Aspen Music Festival, and the Nasher Sculpture Center.

SEE: Art History Students and Alums Talk About Internships & Collaborations

ALUMNI NEWS

Graduate

Virginia Curry, currently a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Dallas, gave a paper at the “Art and Law, Art in Peril” conference at Cambridge University on June 23rd. In October she will present “Museum Collections and Teaching with Objects” at the UNESCO ICOM Council on Collecting annual conference in October in Seoul.

Debbie DeWitte contributed the essay “Drawings in the Salon” to The Paris Fine Art Salon, 1791-1881 (Peter Lang, 2015). The second edition of her book Gateways to Art: Understanding the Visual Arts (Thames & Hudson) is due out in October 2015.

Amanda W. Dotseth is at work on the dissertation “San Quirce de Burgos: Piety and Patrimony in the Long Life of a Romanesque Church” at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. The rural monastic church of San Quirce in the Spanish province of Burgos (Castilla y León) is recognized by scholars, if only briefly treated, for its role in the development of Romanesque sculpture in Iberia. Possibly beginning as a hermitage, San Quirce survives today as a little known but exquisitely decorated building that was documented as a college of canons under the cathedral of Burgos in 1147. It remained as such until its possessions were dissolved by the Spanish government in 1834. Ms. Dotseth’s dissertation will treat not only its heyday in the first half of the twelfth century, but also the site's changes and development over time. The history of the San Quirce reveals links to Castile’s formative period during the tenth century and to the powerful nearby monasteries of Santo Domingo de Silos and San Pedro de Arlanza, in addition to the cathedral of Oca and, after 1075, that of Burgos. The diachronic study of San Quirce's long life, perhaps more hagiography than biography, presented in her thesis respects the changes in function and form the site experienced over time, contextualizing its construction history and questioning long-accepted assumptions in order to (re)insert San Quirce into our broader understanding of the development of Romanesque art. Ms. Dotseth has been a pre-doctoral fellow in the ERC-funded project “Reassessing the Roles of Women as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture,” PI: Therese Martin, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Madrid.

Elisa Foster has been appointed a Lecturer in the John V. Roach Honors College of Texas Christian University.

Elena Gittleman traveled to Huqoq, Israel to participate in the field school excavating an early Byzantine-era synagogue.

Margarita Karasoulas (M.A. 2012), currently a doctoral student at the University of Delaware, presented “Visual Irony and Racial Humor in Winslow Homer’s The Watermelon Boys” at Florida State University¹s 32nd Annual Graduate Student Symposium in October 2014, where she was awarded the Gunther Stamm Prize for Excellence. Her article on Homer is forthcoming in Athanor this fall. She also delivered a paper titled “The Aesthetics of Violence: Lynching and Spectacle in George Bellows’s The Law is Too Slow” at the Tufts University Graduate Student Symposium in March 2015. She will give a talk at the Delaware Art Museum on September 3rd in conjunction with The Puzzling World of John Sloan, the exhibition she curated in summer 2014. In addition, she is co-curating (with S. Hollis Clayson) an expanded version of Electric Paris at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut (opening May 2016).

Kirsty Harper is now Curator of Collections for the Rockwell Museum in Corning, NY.

Rheagan Martin (M.A. '14), a curatorial assistant in the Manuscripts Department at the Getty Museum, is helping organize a future exhibition on classical influences on medieval manuscripts. In 2014-15, he was a Getty Graduate Intern in the same department.

April J. Morris is now Assistant Professor of Art History at Hood College.

Ada Negraru has completed the Master of Library Sciences at Texas Woman’s University and continues to work at SMU’s DeGolyer Library.

Caitlin Overton recently joined the staff of The Warehouse, a project initiated by Howard Rachofsky and Vernon Faulconer to make their collections available to curators, scholars, critics, and students. As the new Gallery Teacher, she hosts tours of current exhibitions, assists in organizing education programs for students, and works on the annual art auction Two by Two for AIDS and Art.

Erin Pinon travelled to Yerevan, Armenia in July to present the paper “Genocide Buried: The Armenian Khatchk’ar as National Tombstone” at the Twelfth Meeting of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. While in Armenia, she will carry out research at the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts, or Matenadaran. Following that trip, she will spend August attending an intensive Armenian language program at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. While in Venice, she will be organizing, and directing, a panel in the Armenian Pavilion on the Island of San Lazzaro in conjunction with the Venice Biennale. This panel will focus on the collection of prints and manuscripts housed on the island and collected by the Mekhitarist Order of Benedictine Monks, who in the eighteenth century populated the island and standardized the Armenian language. Ms. Pinon’s travel has been generously funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research.

Rachel Hay Spradley is at the Getty Museum for a nine-month internship in the Exhibitions Department.

JoAnna Reyes Walton will be leaving her post at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art at the end of August in order to pursue a Ph.D. in art history at UCLA, where she will study with Charlene Villaseñor Black. She has also received a Mellon Summer Stipend that will allow her to return to LACMA next summer to continue working with Ilona Katzew on their forthcoming exhibition and other curatorial projects.

Jessica Weiss will be starting a tenure-track position as an assistant professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

Jun Nakamura (M.A. ’13) was a 2013-14 Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation Curatorial Intern, Department of Prints and Drawings, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Nakamura matriculated with full funding in fall 2014 in the Ph.D. program in art history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He recently presented his research at the Art and Science Conference at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.