Rebekkah Hart is a fourth-year doctoral student studying late medieval art with Professor Elina Gertsman. During the 2024-2025 academic year, 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. She will be a curatorial intern at the J. Paul Getty Museum in the Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department during the 2025-2026 academic year. 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 “More than Lip Service: Liturgical Paxes, or ‘Kissing Images,’ in Late Medieval England (c. 1250-1550).”  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 doctoral student studying the art of medieval Scandinavia with Professor Elina Gertsman. 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 Einar and Eva Lund Haugen Memorial Scholarship for graduate student research, administered by the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. Recently, she has presented papers at the College Art Association’s 113th Annual Conference; the centennial meeting of the Medieval Academy of America; and the International Congress on Medieval Studies. Cecily holds an MFA in Contemporary Visual Culture from the University of Edinburgh an 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. Cecily loves teaching and making medieval art accessible to all, adores dogs, enjoys swimming, and tolerates bad puns.

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 fifth-year PhD student studying nineteenth-century European art with Professor Andrea Rager. Her research interests include late nineteenth-century collaborative and experimental printmaking, early photography, materiality and intermediality, history of collecting, global Impressionism, and ecocriticism. She holds Master’s degrees from the Université de Rennes II and Trinity College, Dublin. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the Margaret R. Mainwaring Curatorial Fellow in Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she curated the exhibition We the People: American Prints from Between the World Wars. Jillian has also held positions at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the National Gallery of Ireland. She has publishedon the collecting craze for French posters in the 1890s in Art in Print, presented on the art of John Ruskin at the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association conference,and was awarded a Getty research grant for her work on the prints of Camille Pissarro. Jillian also currently serves as a curatorial intern in Prints and Drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art and as the Assistant Bibliographer for the Print Council of America’s Oeuvre Catalogue project.

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.

Charlie Mason is a first-year PhD student studying Byzantine art with Professor Elizabeth S. Bolman. 

Susana Montanes-Lleras is a Ph.D. candidate working with professors Henry Adams and Andrea Rager on European and American art in the long 19th century.  She is currently working on her dissertation, “The Sleeping Princess and The Creeping Briar: Book  Illustration, Pictorial Language, and the Rhetoric of Fantasy.” nineteenth-century British and American Art, the history of the book, and the relations between text and image, as well as intertextuality in book illustration. She has presented her research at the symposium “Mythical Pasts, Fantasy Futures: The Middle Ages in Modern Visual Culture,” co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Haggerty Museum of Art, as well as the third annual conference of The Incredible Nineteenth Century. This fall, she will be presenting at the 2025 VISAWUS and NAVSA conferences. Susana earned her bachelor’s degree from Universidad de los Andes in her natal Bogotá, Colombia, has an MA in World Heritage Studies from B-TU Cottbus, Germany, and an MA in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts (NYU). She has worked with several heritage preservation institutions, with the art department of the British Council in Bogota, and as a curatorial intern at the Whitney Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art, where she curated the 2024 exhibition Fairy Tales and Fables: Illustration and Storytelling in Art.

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.

Clara Pinchbeck is a fifth-year doctoral candidate studying Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean art with Professor Elizabeth S. Bolman. She is interested in the material culture of Late Antique interior spaces, the transmission and trade of textiles and looms along the Silk Road(s), late Roman information technologies, and the application of digital methods to analyze early Eastern Byzantine histories. Her research primarily focuses on Late Antique Egyptian textiles and their roles within the religious, cultural, political, economic, and geographic networks of the Eastern Mediterranean. Pinchbeck has presented her work at the College Art Association Annual Conference, the Byzantine Studies of North America Conference, and the Archaeological Institute of America Annual Meeting. In Summers 2024 and 2023, she joined Professor Maggie Popkin as a part of a global, interdisciplinary archaeological project in Greece, where she was a team member on the American Excavations at Samothrace. Pinchbeck received her BA in Art History and Anthropology from Kenyon College in 2018 and her MA in Digital Art History from Duke University in 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 fifth-year PhD candidate studying Greek and Roman art and archaeology with Dr. Maggie Popkin. Her research focuses on how ancient artisans shaped public, private, and community identities through material culture with special interests in image replication, distribution, and coinage. She is the Research Lead for the Kelvin Smith Library Special Collections Roman Coin Collection. Arielle has presented multiple times at the Archaeological Institute of America Annual Meeting and in the fall, she will present at the 22nd International Congress on Ancient Bronzes. In the 2023-2024 academic year, she was the curatorial intern in the Department of Greek and Roman Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She has participated in the American Excavations Samothrace on-site and remotely for the past three years. She is a member of the 68th class of the American Numismatic Society Eric P. Newman Graduate Seminar in Numismatics and the 2022 SITSA cohort 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 second-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 identity and the body, (dis)embodiment, the intersection of ritual and natural landscapes, and how the pagan past is carried into, characterized by, and remodeled in the later Middle Ages. She earned her MA in Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she researched Celtic imagery depicting the human head. She also holds dual BA degrees in History and Art History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Recently, she has presented papers at the 2024 Celtic Studies Association of North America Conference and the 2024 Performing Magic in the Pre-Modern North Conference. Rachel served as Lecture Committee co-chair in the 2024-25 academic year, and this year she looks forward to serving as the co-chair of the 51st Annual Cleveland Symposium and as president of the Graduate Association of Medieval Studies.

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. Recently, she was awarded the Byzantine Studies Conference Graduate Student Paper prize for her paper, “‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’: The Execution of Judas Iscariot in Two Byzantine Marginal Psalters.” Sam has previously held internships at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. She is currently serving as the 2023–2025 Samuel H. Kress Institutional Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Allison Boroff is a second-year Art History and Museum Studies student and a Keithley Fellow. She holds a BA in Studio Art and Art History as well as a Museum Studies minor from Florida State University. This fall, she will be an intern in the Prints and Drawings Department at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Alli is interested in medieval artistic production and the veneration of liturgical objects. Her most recent project, an exhibition proposal titled “Form and Function: Artists’ Signatures in the Late Middle Ages,” examined the construction of premodern artistic identity as expressed through authorial inscriptions in devotional artwork from the 13th to 16th centuries.

Anna Farber is a first-year MA student and CMA Fellow pursuing a degree in medieval art history. She holds a BA from Oberlin College with high honors in art history for her thesis about Mary Magdalene’s relics and their effect on her role as a patron saint of the Angevin dynasty. She is interested in continuing to research relics through a disability studies lens. Her other research interests include medieval Jewish art, art as a tool in performance, and gaps and erasure in medieval art history. She has interned at the Met Cloisters, and worked at the Met Cloisters, Christie’s, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. 

Madalyn Fox is a second-year MA student in the Art History and Museum Studies program and a Barbato Fellow. A graduate of CWRU, she holds a BA with honors in Art History and Political Science. Her research interests center on global contemporary art and pubic engagement, with particular attention paid to issues of identity, temporality, and ecocriticism. At the Cleveland Museum of Art, she has held several fellowships and internships across departments. In Summer 2025, she was the 5th Annual Keithley Fellow in Community Engaged Art History at the Cleveland Public Library and completed curatorial research with the Gund Gallery. Madalyn’s writing has been published in Cleveland Art magazine and the Collective Arts Network journal. In her free time, you’ll find her with her dog, Wilbur.

Lachelle Guardia de Diego is a first-year Art History MA student and Barbato Fellow studying with Professor Maggie Popkin. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Michigan-Dearborn with a BA in Integrative Studies combining history, art history, and applied art. Her research seeks to interrogate dominant historical narratives and elucidate the lives of gladiators, charioteers, and other entertainers in Ancient Rome. She is also interested in the intersection of art, food, and imperialism from antiquity to the Renaissance, with emphases on the communication of exotic flavor profiles and on representations of culinary and viticultural labor. Lachelle is an independently published author of speculative fiction. In her free time, she enjoys writing, drawing, cooking, and studying Latin.

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.

Tara Smith is a second-year MA student in the Art History program. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Toledo with a BA in English Literature and Art History in 2023. She has interned with the Colnaghi Gallery in Madrid and WOLFS Gallery in Beachwood, OH. Tara is interested in modern and contemporary art; her research interests include gender, race, and the use of written word in visual arts. As of Fall 2025, she is working on her qualifying paper on Ford Madox Brown’s Cordelia Parting from her Sisters (1854) with Dr. Andrea Rager. A music lover, she enjoys playing violin and guitar in her free time.

Madeline Tirschwell

Maya Virdell

Alexandru Zaharia is a first-year Art History MA student and Barbato Fellow. He is interested in the artistic influences of medieval and early modern commercial and cultural networks in the Eastern Mediterranean. He has worked with the collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and has presented at several symposia. He received a BFA in Art History with Academic and Departmental Honors from MassArt, where he was a three-time Art History Excellence and Service Award recipient as well as an Honorary Faculty Member. Alexandru also holds a BS in Civil/Structural Engineering and has almost a decade of experience in that field. He enjoys photography and illustration in his spare time.