Rebekkah Hart is a doctoral student studying late medieval art with Professor Elina Gertsman. Rebekkah’s research interests include the role of sensorial reception, performativity, and materiality in late medieval devotional imagery. First and foremost, Rebekkah is fascinated by objects. She has begun working on her dissertation, tentatively titled “The Kiss of Peace: Materialities and Afterlives of Liturgical Paxes, or ‘Kissing Images,’ in Late Medieval England (c. 1250-1550).” During the 2025-2026 academic year, she was a curatorial intern at the J. Paul Getty Museum in the Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department. Previously, Rebekkah was the curatorial intern for Medieval Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art under the direction of Dr. Gerhard Lutz, where she worked on an upcoming exhibition on Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal. Forthcoming publications include “Powders and Plasters: Alabaster and the Curative Consumption of Holy Medieval Sculpture,” slated to appear in the postprint volume of the Paris ARDS 2022 conference, and “‘As in a Glass’: Material Transparency and Reflexive Seeing in Albrecht Bouts’ Annunciation (c. 1480)” in an edited volume on Marian devotion and the senses.

Anthony Huffman is a second-year doctoral student studying nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American art with Professor Andrea Rager. His research interests include links between the history of the decorative, murals, ornamentation, and abstraction; craft traditions; notions of framing and perception; public art, architecture, and spatial politics; eco-criticism; and art theory and historiography. In varying discursive formats, he has probed these topics through exhibitions, catalogue texts, public programs, reviews, and critical essays. Anthony has published in several leading publications for modern and contemporary art, including Artforum, Art Monthly, and The Brooklyn Rail. He has presented at many interdisciplinary conferences, such as the annual conferences of the Midwest Art History Society and the Society for French Historical Studies. His scholarship has been supported through grants and residencies from the Knight Foundation, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, Phi Beta Kappa, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Prior to Case, he worked as a researcher for Hauser & Wirth and served as Curator-in-Residence at Kunstraum Gallery in New York, where he organized Chronologies and Circumstances (2021) and Historiographical Interventions (2022). Anthony graduated cum laude from Centre College in 2014 with a BA in Government and holds an MA in Art History from CWRU.

Cecily Hughes is a fourth-year PhD candidate studying the art of  medieval Scandinavia with Professor Elina Gertsman, and a Curatorial Research Assistant in Medieval Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. With an avid interest in understanding how objects made meaning for their viewers, she is especially drawn to contextual considerations of environment, folk practices and mythologies, religious syncretism and interfaith interactions, and medieval approaches to humor. Cecily is the 2025–26 awardee of the generous Einar and Eva Lund Haugen Memorial Scholarship for graduate student research, administered by the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. Recently, Cecily has presented papers at the College Art Association’s 113th Annual Conference in New York City; the Centennial Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America at Harvard University, in Cambridge MA, where she won the Best Student Paper Prize; and the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, MI. Cecily holds a BA from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, and an MFA in Contemporary Visual Culture from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. In 2022, she received her MA in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her previous work includes positions at Elms College in Chicopee, Massachusetts, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Alexandra Kaczenski is a PhD candidate studying late medieval art with Professor Elina Gertsman. Her dissertation focuses on fifteenth-century representations of Saint Agatha in communal devotional contexts. Alex is an Assistant Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, responsible for the museum’s Northern European collections.  Previously, she was a curatorial assistant at the Norton Simon Museum (2022-2024), where she curated the exhibition Word as Image. She has also held positions the curatorial intern for the Medieval Art Department at the Cleveland Museum of Art (2020-2021), and as the Chair the Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies (2022-2023). Prior to coming to Cleveland, she worked as both a curatorial graduate intern and a curatorial assistant in the Manuscripts Department at the J. Paul Getty Museum. She co-authored the book Sacred Landscapes: Nature in Renaissance Manuscripts with Dr. Bryan Keene, to coincide with their exhibition of the same name (Getty Museum, 2017). She received her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art (2013).

Jillian Kruse is a PhD candidate studying nineteenth-century European art with Professor Andrea Rager. Her dissertation explores Camille Pissarro’s experimental and collaborative printmaking practice in dialogue with the artist’s anarchist philosophy. Jillian currently serves as the Chester Dale Fellow in drawings and prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 2022-2025, she worked as an intern and fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where she guest-curated the exhibition Imagination in the Age of Reason and assisted with numerous others, including Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism and Karamu Artists Inc.; Printmaking, Race, and Community. Before coming to Cleveland, she served as the Margaret R. Mainwaring Curatorial Fellow in prints, drawings, and photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she also curated the We the People: American Prints from Between the World Wars exhibition. In addition to her museum work, Jillian has presented papers at the conferences of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, the College Art Association, and the Comité Internationale de l’Histoire de l’Art World Congress. Her research has appeared in Art in Print and received support from the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, the Getty Research Institute, and the Society for French Historical Studies.

Benjamin Levy  is a PhD candidate specializing in the history of printmaking and photography. His research explores the materiality and meaning-making potential of process and technique, from 19th-century photomechanical technologies to contemporary artistic practice. His dissertation, “A Gray Area: The Technical and Aesthetic Development of the Photographic Halftone,” investigates the cultural and artistic significance of this process across historical and contemporary contexts. Levy has presented this research at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the 36th Congress of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art. His work has been supported by the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation and the Getty Paper Project. Levy has held curatorial positions at the John and Mildred Putnam Collection, the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. He curated the 2022 exhibition “Photographs in Ink” at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Levy is a member of the 2022 Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art cohort at the Harvard Art Museums and serves on the National Advisory Board for the Tamarind Institute. A graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, Levy studied printmaking and photography, receiving training to be a collaborative printer.

Marina Mandrikova is a fifth-year Ph.D. student studying Byzantine visual culture with Professor Elizabeth S. Bolman. Her research explores the images of the damned in Byzantine, post-Byzantine, and Slavic monumental painting, and the nature of their sins, crimes, and punishments. Marina is also passionate about the preservation of medieval art and architecture. She was a 2020-21 Graduate Student Fellow of the American Institute for Southeast European Studies and completed the ASCSA’s M. Alison Frantz Fellowship in Post-Classical Studies at the Gennadius Library in Athens, Greece, in 2022. Recently, Marina was awarded the Council of American Overseas Research Centers’ Multi-Country Research Fellowship and Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellowship for 2024-25.  She taught various undergraduate art history courses at Temple University, Philadelphia, and completed museum internships in Russia and Bulgaria. She co-organized two graduate student workshops for the Delaware Valley Medieval Association and presented papers at Byzantine and Medieval Studies conferences. Marina transferred to CWRU from Temple University, where she started her Ph.D. journey in the Department of Art History under the guidance of Doctor Bolman. Before that, she lived in Russia, where she earned her MA degrees in World Art History and International Relations from the St. Petersburg State University.

Madeline Newquist is a fourth-year doctoral student studying ancient Greek and Roman art with Professor Maggie Popkin. Her research focuses on the formation of identity in the ancient Mediterranean and the relationship between systems of exploitation and art in the Greco-Roman world. In the spring of 2023 Madeline took on the role of Co-Chair for the Graduate Art History Association, a position that she held until the end of 2024. She also acted as a co-organizer for the 50th annual Cleveland Symposium, hosted jointly by Case Western Reserve University’s Department of Art History and the Cleveland Museum of Art. For the past year she has been working as an intern in the Department of Greek and Roman Art at the CMA, under the guidance of Dr. Seth Pevnick. Her research going forward will focus on the material culture of ancient Italy and the archaeological evidence of the environmental exploitation that fueled artistic consumption in the Roman Empire.

Fiona Owens is a first-year doctoral student studying 19th-century American and British art with Professor Andrea Rager. Her work investigates the intersections between material culture and what has traditionally been considered fine art. More broadly, Fiona’s research interests include the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the Arts and Crafts movement, the Celtic Revival movement, transatlantic artistic exchange, and women artists. She recently earned her MA from the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, where she wrote her thesis on the frames of Boston painter Mary Lizzie Macomber. While in the Delaware area, Fiona worked as an American Art Summer Fellow at the Philadelphia Art Museum and as curatorial intern at the Delaware Art Museum. She also holds a BA from McGill University in Art History. Originally from Baltimore, she can be observed adding Old Bay to any recipe she can find. Fiona is also an avid knitter and amateur sewist.

Clara Pinchbeck is a fifth-year PhD candidate studying Late Antique and Byzantine art, advised by Dr. Elizabeth S. Bolman. Her dissertation examines fourth–seventh-century Egyptian burial textiles, including their excavation, nineteenth-century display, and their ancient functions within the religious, cultural, political, economic, and geographic networks of the Eastern Mediterranean. Her broader interests include the material culture of Late Antique interiors; the transmission of textiles and loom technologies along the Silk Roads; late Roman information technologies; and digital methods for studying early Eastern Byzantine histories. She has presented at the College Art Association Annual Conference, the Byzantine Studies of North America Conference, the Archaeological Institute of America Annual Meeting, and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. In the summers of 2023 and 2024, she was a member of the Topographical Survey team for the American Excavations at Samothrace. In 2023–2024, she was a curatorial intern in Medieval Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and in 2025 she received technical textile training at the Centre International d’Étude des Textiles Anciens. She is currently the Graduate Research Intern in Antique, Byzantine, and Medieval Textiles at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and serves as Conference Officer for the Byzantine Studies Association of North America Graduate Committee. She holds a BA in Art History and Anthropology from Kenyon College (cum laude, 2018) and an MA in Digital Art History from Duke University (2020).

Claire Sumner is a fifth-year PhD candidate studying Early Modern Italy under Dr. Erin Benay. She received her MA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2020 and her BA from Randolph College in 2015. Her work explores the technological developments in the creation of sculpture in Early Modern Italy, the materiality of clay, and the movement of information across territorial borders. In the 2023-2024 academic year, she was the curatorial intern in the Department of European Paintings and Sculpture 1500-1800 where she assisted in developing an exhibition on the painter Filippino Lippi. Claire has presented her research internationally, including at the 2023 conference Celebrations at Court: Ephemeral Objects, Materials, and Machineries in the Early Modern Period at the University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark and will be part of a panel on the imagined landscapes of the Indies in the Global Baroque at the 2024 Sixteenth Century Society Conference in Toronto, Canada. She has been selected to participate in the Medici Archive Project Paleography Seminar in January 2025. She has previously worked at the Maier Museum of Art in Lynchburg, VA and the Anchorage Museum in Anchorage, AK.

Arielle Suskin is a PhD candidate studying Greek and Roman art and archaeology with Dr. Maggie Popkin and a Regular Member/Diana E.E. Kleiner Memorial Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Her research focuses on how ancient peoples shaped public, private, and community identities through material culture, with a special interest in image replication, distribution, and coinage. In summer 2025, she was awarded a Research Grant from the Decorative Arts Trust to conduct research for her dissertation on Roman bronze figural balsamaria. She is the Research Lead for the Kelvin Smith Library Special Collections Roman Coin Collection. Arielle has presented at national and international conferences on the ancient world and has lectured on numismatic topics for the general public. She was previously a research assistant and curatorial intern in the Department of Greek and Roman Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She has participated in the American Excavations Samothrace, the American Numismatic Society Eric P. Newman Graduate Seminar in Numismatics, and the Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art (SITSA) at the Harvard Art Museums. She holds an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU and a BA cum laude from Tulane University.

Rachel Sweeney is a third-year doctoral student studying medieval art and architecture with Professor Elina Gertsman. Her research interests focus on images from medieval Britain and Ireland, and include monstrosity, identity and the body, and the intersection of ritual and natural landscapes. This year, Rachel is serving as the curatorial intern in the Department of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Recently, she has presented her work at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, the 61st International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo, and the 101st Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America. Rachel was the recipient of the 2026 Terence Barry Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Irish Medieval Studies from the American Society for Irish Medieval Studies, and the 2026 Best Doctoral Student Paper Award from the CWRU Art History Department. Rachel has previously held positions as the co-chair of the 51st Annual Cleveland Symposium, president of the Graduate Association of Medieval Studies, and co-chair of the Lecture Committee. She earned her MA in Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and holds dual BA degrees in History and Art History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Sam Truman is a PhD candidate studying medieval art with Professor Elina Gertsman. Sam is currently in the process of writing her dissertation, which focuses on representations of ghosts in northern European manuscripts produced between approximately 1100 and 1500. In 2022–2023, Sam served as the curatorial intern in the Department of Manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum, where she assisted on the exhibition Lumen: The Art and Science of Light (9/10/2024–12/8/2024) and the gallery rotation Graphic Design in the Middle Ages (8/29/2023–1/28/2024). She has previously held internships in the Department of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art and in the Library and Archives of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. From 2023–2025, Sam served as the Samuel H. Kress Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has presented papers and organized panels at several conferences including the Byzantine Studies Conference, the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, and the International Medieval Congress at Leeds. In fall 2025, she will be teaching Art History 101 and Medieval Art Survey 241 at Case Western Reserve University.

Anna Farber is a CMA Fellow and second-year MA student in Art History and Museum Studies. She received a BA from Oberlin College with high honors in art history. Her research interests include gender and the body in medieval art, medieval Jewish manuscripts, and the visual culture of medicine. She earned CWRU Art History’s Best MA Paper Award in 2026 for “Dividing a Life: The CMA’s Belt as a Marriage Gift.” She has presented her work at SECAC, the Cleveland Symposium, and the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. She is one of the co-organizers of the 52nd Cleveland Symposium, and holds two positions at the CMA: a curatorial fellowship in medieval art and an internship in Adult Programs and Interpretation.

Annelies Knight  is a first-year MA student and CMA Fellow pursuing a degree in late medieval art history and museum studies. She holds a BA in art history from the University of Iowa with honors for her thesis on witch imagery in Germany and central Europe from 1497-1545. She is interested in the relationship between late medieval and early Renaissance ideas and techniques in Northern Europe. She has worked at the Stanley Museum of Art as both gallery host and intern, as well as at the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections.

Alyssa Parrnelli is a first-year MA student and Barbato Fellow pursuing a degree in ancient art history. She has a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with highest honors in classical archaeology for her thesis about the Antonine emperors and their recuperation of the image of the imperial family. She has won awards for her research and excavations abroad in Italy and Portugal where she studied Roman villas and ancient cities, focusing on local interactions with the process of Romanization. She has also explored the geographical world through her work with the Ancient World Mapping Center. Her art historical research interests include identity, self-expression, and liminality in visual art.

Helena von Sadovszky is a first-year MA student and Barbato Fellow whose primary area of interest lies in medieval arms and armor — both in actual objects and in their depictions. She intends to continue exploring this and her other research interests that include the presence of chivalric ideals as reflected in martial scenes and decorated armor, particularly in interactions between Western Europe and the Middle East. Helena graduated summa cum laude with University Honors and a BA in Medieval Studies from Ohio Wesleyan University. She recently presented her thesis, “Exclusions of Chivalry: An Exploration of how the Enemy is Heroized or Demonized in Depictions of the Third Crusade,” at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies. When not studying, she can be found sword fighting or exploring local comic book stores.

Vivienne Soares is a first-year MA student and Barbato Fellow pursuing a degree in medieval art history. She holds a BA in art history from Hunter College with high honors for her thesis on a 14th-century reliquary from a Hungarian convent dedicated to Elisabeth of Hungary. She was additionally awarded the Tukman Fellowship for her work on monastic medicine through Hildegard von Bingen’s Physica. At CWRU, she will continue her work on monastic women in the Middle Ages, specifically in Eastern Europe and Germany, with thematic focuses on memory and artistic identity in religious objects. When she is not researching, she can be found in antique bookstores, libraries and record shops..

Madeline Tirschwell is a first-year MA student and Barbato Fellow pursuing a degree in art history. She received her BA from Brown University with honors for her thesis on a 14th-century fresco series in the convent church of San Pietro at Viboldone. Her research interests include female monastic spirituality and women’s experiences with art within that context. She has held internships at the Neue Galerie in New York and Lippitt House Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, and research positions at Georgetown University and the Brown department of Hispanic and Francophone Studies. In her free time, she likes to knit.

Maya Virdell is a Byzantine coin enthusiast, second-year MA student in Art History/Museum Studies, and a Keithley Fellow. She holds a BA with honors in Art History from Kenyon College for her thesis on the coinage of Empress Zoe and Theodora. The thesis explored how the empresses continued and disrupted the iconographic traditions of male predecessors to create their own relevant image of authority. Her research interests include late antiquity, imperial propaganda, and Greek epigraphy. Her translations and research on a funerary plot in the Kerameikos can be found on Attic Inscriptions Online. She has worked at Kenyon’s Blick Harris Study Collection, interned at the Museum of Cycladic Art, the Herakleidon Museum, and excavated with the Voula field school.