PhD

Dominique DeLuca is a specialist in medieval art, who received her PhD in 2020, after defending a dissertation that explored images of shadows in fifteenth-century secular manuscripts. Among her publications are “Bonum est mortis meditari: Meanings and Functions of the Medieval Double Macabre Portrait,” in a volume edited by Albrecht Classen, Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death, as well as catalogue entries in Myth and Mystique: Cleveland’s French Gothic Table Fountain exhibition catalogue, edited by Elina Gertsman and Stephen Fliegel. Dominique has worked extensively with objects and staff from the Cleveland Museum of Art. She was a curatorial intern in the Indian and Southeast Asian Art department where she was involved in the development of the 2016 exhibition Art and Stories from Mughal India and its catalogue, and a curatorial intern with the department of Medieval Art. In 2018, she participated in the Mellon Summer Institute in French Paleography at the Newberry Library, and was a recipient of the Etienne Gilson Dissertation Grant from the Medieval Academy of America. In 2019-20 she was a Mellon Fellow in the Department of Education and Academic Affairs at the CMA. After working as a researcher at Les Enluminures, the New York- and Paris-based gallery that specializes in manuscripts and miniatures from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Nikki accepted a full-time teaching position at the University of Vermont.

Kylie Fisher is a specialist in early modern Italian art. Her dissertation, partially supported by the Walter Read Hovey Memorial Fund scholarship from The Pittsburgh Foundation, explored the formidable role that engravings played in how ancient Rome was understood, imagined, and remembered in the sixteenth century. Kylie has held several museum internships, including one in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where she researched the permanent collection of Italian drawings. She also worked as the IFPDA Foundation Curatorial Intern at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, where she helped to organize the centennial show, A Century of Women in Prints, 1917-2017 as well as Lines of Inquiry: Learning from Rembrandt’s Etchings, for which she contributed to the exhibition catalogue. Kylie has presented her research at the annual conferences of the Midwest Art History Society and Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. Her article, “Drawing from Mantegna: Engaging with Engraving in Cinquecento Northern Italian Art,” was published in Athanor 35.

Lauryn Smith received her PhD in 2022 in early modern Netherlandish paintings and European decorative arts. Her dissertation examined the cabinets of Amalia van Solms-Braunfels (1602-1675), Princess of Orange, to illuminate instances of innovation and exchange in her collecting practices and patronage. She presented her research internationally, including at the Dressing the Early Modern Network (Abegg-Stiftung, Switzerland), Association for Art History, and Netherlandish Society for Seventeenth-Century Studies conferences. Additionally, Lauryn co-organized numerous panels and conferences, notably an international music and visual culture conference at the University of Toronto (2016). Her research was supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the Historians of Netherlandish Art. An aspiring curator, Lauryn was selected for the 2021 CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice cohort. Additionally, she completed internships in North America and the UK at the Cuming Museum, Christie’s, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others. In 2017, she co-founded an international technical art history collaboration that was one of 17 projects funded by the CWRU’s Provost’s Office (2019). For the 2021-2022 academic year, Lauryn was the inaugural Frick Collection and Frick Art Reference Library Digital Art History Fellow.

Angelica Verduci is a specialist in medieval art who defended her dissertation, “Mors Triumphans in Medieval Italian Murals: From Allegory to Performance,” in 2023. Angelica’s research interests lie at the intersections of macabre and eschatological imagery, performance, pastoral theology, and vernacular culture. Angelica received her M.A. in Art History at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, and a diploma in Archive Administration, Paleography and Diplomatics from the Milan Archivio di Stato. In 2018, Angelica co-chaired the 44th Cleveland Symposium, and was a teaching assistant for Art History 101, for which she received the 2019 Graduate Dean’s Instructional Excellence Award. Angelica served as one of the 2019-20 representatives of the Graduate Art History Association (GAHA), and worked as an intern in the CMA Department of Prints and Drawings under the supervision of Dr. Emily Peters. In the summers of 2020 and 2021, she taught Art History I: Pyramids to Pagodas and Art History II: Michelangelo to Maya Lin at Case Western Reserve University. She is currently working on several articles on Italian Triumph of Death and Dance of Death imagery. Her dissertation research has been supported by the International Center of Medieval Art. 

Bing Wang concentrates on global photography 1839–1939, with focus on East, South, and Southeast Asia. Bing received her PhD in 2022 with the dissertation entitled “William Pryor Floyd: The Art and Business of Photography in Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong.” In her third year, as a curatorial intern under the supervision of Dr. Barbara Tannenbaum, Curator of Photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art, she worked on standardizing the terminology used to describe media/process in the CMA photographic collection and researched an album of photographs by one of the most celebrated 19th-century Indian photographers, Raja Deen Dayal (1844–1905). From her fourth year on, as a curatorial assistant in the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, she has been working on the upcoming exhibition on Chinese photography. After she earned a bachelor’s degree in Museology from China, she joined the Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management (F+PPCM) Master of Arts, a collaborative program between Ryerson University, Toronto, and George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, and completed both the photography and film tracks. She has recently presented her research at the annual conferences of the Midwest Art History Society and of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. (LinkedIn page: www.linkedin.com/in/bing-wang-35a51866).

MA

Shayla Croteau received her MA in Art History in 2022. Shayla is particularly interested in the intersections of anatomy and depiction of the human figure in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art. Shayla graduated with high honors from Michigan State University’s Residential College in the Arts and Humanities in 2019, earning a BA in Arts and Humanities with minors in Art History and Museum Studies. She worked as a publications intern at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, MI and co-curated the Broad Art Lab’s inaugural exhibition, Mining the Collection. She also served as president of the MSU Art History Association.

Mia Hafer received her MA in Art History in 2020 and is pursuing her PhD in medieval art at the University of Kansas with Anne D. Hedeman. Her research interests include representations of identity and otherness, and how markers of gender, sexuality, religion, and nationality inform medieval secular imagery. Her qualifying paper on medieval ivory won the Friends of Art Best MA Paper Award in 2020.  Mia has previously served as the Collections Management intern for the CWRU Putnam Sculpture Collection.

Laurén Kozlowski  earned an MA in History and Museum Studies in 2022. Her interests lie in the Early Modern and Classical periods, predominantly in the impact of the archaeological findings of Greek and Roman objects during the Renaissance. Laurén graduated from the College of Wooster in 2020, earning a BA in both Art History and Archaeology with minors in Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Studio Art. She served as president of the Art History and Museum Studies Club, and the Archaeology Student Colloquium. Laurén was inducted as a member of the National Anthropology Honors Society, Lambda Alpha. She has volunteered at the Wayne County Historical Society and worked as a Collections Management Intern at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Kate Hublou received an MA in Art History and Museum Studies in 2019. Kate specializes in British, German and Scandinavian art and design of the long nineteenth century and is particularly interested in materiality, historic revivals, eco-criticism and post-colonialism. She has presented her work on Victorian eco-critical ironwork at the Nineteenth Century Studies Association and recently published an essay on the topic in SEQUITUR 6, no. 2. While in the CWRU program, Kate co-curated with Stephen Harrison, Color and Comfort: Swedish Modern Design – an exhibition proposed by the 2019 cohort of museum studies students. After graduating she was the Center for American Art Summer Silver Fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her research and writing from that fellowship will be included in the forthcoming volume of American Silver at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Currently, Kate is Research Associate of Applied Arts of Europe at the at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Julia LaPlaca received her MA in Art History and Museum Studies from CWRU in 2019. Currently she is pursuing a PhD in Late Medieval/Early Modern European Art with an additional interest in Museum Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor with Achim Timmermann.  Before arriving at CWRU, Julia co-curated an exhibition on Grand Rapids artist Jaro Hess (1889-1977) at the 106 Division Gallery in Grand Rapids (2016). During her studies at CWRU, Julia interned at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the textile conservation department and contributed curatorial research to textile and prints & drawing exhibitions at the CMA. She has presented her research at the Midwest Art History Society Conference. Most recently, Julia has conducted architectural surveys for the Cleveland Landmarks Commission while serving in AmeriCorps and worked as an instructor of Art History at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Cameron McConnell received an MA in Art History MA student in 2022. She is primarily interested in the intersection of politics and religion in the medieval world and the development and veneration of religious imagery. Her secondary interests include the semiotics of architecture and hagiographic iconography. She graduated with distinction from Southern Methodist University with a BA in Art History and Markets & Culture. At SMU, her senior thesis focused on the shifts in types of funding at the Metropolitan Museum of Art over sixty years. Cameron was also a member of the Meadows Museum Student Collective and worked to raise awareness of the collection on campus.

Julie Polsinelli earned her MA in Art History and Museum Studies in 2022. Her focus is modern and contemporary art, exploring identity through race and gender. She earned a BA in Art History (magna cum laude) from the Myers School of Art and Williams Honors College at the University of Akron. There, Julie became the first undergraduate student to curate an exhibition at the Emily Davis Gallery, The Works of Harriet Sophia Phillips. She went on to work at the Akron Art Museum, supporting the Executive and Curatorial departments for two years.

Sydney Slacas received her dual degree (MA/JD) in Art History and Museum Studies program and a JD in 2022. She earned a BA in Painting and Drawing with a minor in Art History from the South Carolina School of the Arts. In the summer of 2020 she was the legal intern for the International Foundation for Art Research. Her research interests include art and museum law as well as modern and contemporary art history. She was active in both the law school and art history communities, serving as a student representative in both schools as well as an executive board member for the Sports and Entertainment Law Society.

Erica Spilger received her MA in Art History and Museum Studies in 2020. Her interests include cross cultural exchanges of people, ideas, and objects, and the power dynamics at hand in the Spanish colonization of the Americas and Asia. Erica received her BA in Art History from Ohio University through the Honors Tutorial College. For her undergraduate thesis, she curated an exhibition titled “Expression and Repression: Contemporary Art Censorship in America” at the Kennedy Museum of Art in Athens, Ohio. As a CMA Fellow, she has worked with the museum’s photography curator Barbara Tannenbaum; her projects have entailed researching and entering data for new acquisitions, dating works in the collection, and writing fun facts about objects for the museum’s website.

Rebecca Woodruff received her MA in the Art History and Museum Studies program in 2020. Rebecca is primarily interested in examining the long eighteenth century through the lenses of material culture, reception theory, and social history. In addition to her internship at the Cleveland Museum of Art, she has worked as a curatorial intern for the Cleveland History Center’s costume collection and the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan. She has also interned as a content researcher for Enfilade, the serial newsletter for Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture, and she served as a co-chair for the 45th Annual Cleveland Symposium. Rebecca has presented a number of conference papers, including “Empathetic Confrontations: David, Kauffman, and Homeric Narratives” at the Midwest Art History Society in Cleveland.