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Achievements from Students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

and read more about Faculty, Student, Digital Scholarship and Alumni Achievements from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Archaeology

Graduate students in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology hosted Professor Dimitri Nakassis (University of Colorado, Boulder) for the annual C. Densmore Curtis Lecture in October. Professor Nakassis gave the lecture “Seeing Like a Mycenaean State” and led a graduate student seminar on statehood in Bronze Age Greece.

Maggie Beeler defended her Ph.D. Dissertation titled The Social Dynamics of Early Helladic Sealing Practices in October. This fall Maggie as an Adjunct Teaching Professor in Greek and Roman Classics. In October, Maggie was a panelist for a workshop on teaching race in the classics at the Classical Association of the Atlantic States (CAAS) Fall 2018 meeting in Philadelphia.

Tracey Cian attended the Seminar for Arabian Studies at the British Museum in London from August 3-5.

Shannon Dunn presented her paper "Poseidon Sanctuaries in the Saronic Gulf: A Landscape Approach" at the Graduate Group end-of-term celebration on December 13. This past June she attended the Summer Seminar on Ancient Greek Religion at the American School in Athens, Greece, where she toured the archaeological remains of Greek sites throughout the mainland.

Jessica Goodman returned from the archaeological excavations at Cosa, Italy.

Matthew Jameson participated in ongoing excavations at Hili 8 in the United Arab Emirates in November. While in the UAE, Matt also spent several weeks researching ceramic materials from the Hellenistic Arabian site of Mleiha for his dissertation. In August, Matt attended the Seminar for Arabian Studies at the British Museum in London. Early this summer he attended the 5-day “Intensive Course on Pre-Islamic Saudi Arabia” at Princeton University, focusing on epigraphy of the South Arabian Script. In June and July, Matt and History of Art Professor Jie Shi conducted photogrammetry work making 3D models of Han Dynstasy bronze mirrors at Princeton University and the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.

Ashley Mason is spending this academic year as a regular member at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

Clare Rasmussen continued her role as trench supervisor at the excavations of Mt. Lykaion in the Greek Peloponnese.

Andrea Samz-Pustol is spending this academic year as an Associate Member at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. This past summer Andrea returned to the ongoing excavations at Morgantina in Sicily for fieldwork.

Zach Silvia presented the paper “Collecting Practices and Imperial Narratives in the Achaemenid Persian Empire” at the symposium “Storytelling as Power, Resistance, Critique: A graduate and undergraduate symposium inspired by the work of Tania El Khoury” at ������̳ on November 9. From July-August he continued his role as topographer and field supervisor at the excavations of the Hellenistic fortification Bashtepa in western Uzbekistan, run by the Joint Uzbek-American Expedition to Bukhara.

Megan Sligar continued her work as finds registrar for the archaeological excavations at the Hellenistic fortification Bashtepa run by the Joint Uzbek-American Expedition to Bukhara.

Andrew Tharler returned to the excavations at Morgantina, Sicily for ongoing archaeological field research.

Chemistry

Bashkim Kokona successfully defended his doctoral dissertation The L30e ribosomal protein from S. cerevisiae binds to its transcript RNA more strongly than to its primary target helix 58 of ribosomal RNA. He has accepted a Post-Doctoral position in the Lou Charkoudian Lab in the Department of Chemistry at Haverford College.

Edwin Ragwan published his paper co-authored with Chemistry professor Yan Kung in the journal Biochemistry titled “New crystallographic snapshots of large domain movements in bacterial HMG-CoA reductase” in September.

Classics

R.J. Barnes presented his talk “Charm and Sublimity: Platonius on Eupolis” at the Classical Association of the Atlantic States Fall meeting in Philadelphia in early October.

Daniel Crosby published his “Review of Jan N. Bremmer, Maidens, Magic, and Martyrs in Early Christianity: Collected Essays I.” in the ������̳ Classical Review (2018.06.34). This fall, Dan teaches Greek 101: Herodotus in the Department of Classics. He presented his paper “Remembering Quinctilius Varus: Opposing Perspectives on the Memory and Memorialization of the Failed General in the Annales of Tacitus” at the Monuments and Memory: Contesting Identity in the Classical Landscape symposium at University of California, Berkeley in April.

Collin Hilton received the Berthe M. Marti Fellowship to study at the American Academy of Rome from mid-October to mid-July. Collin will present the paper “Porphyry Lost between Greek and Latin Neoplatonism: Macrobius and Olympiodorus on the Distinction of Poetic and Philosophical Myth,”at the Optanda erat oblivion conference in Bari, Italy on December 20-21. In January he will present his paper “Plutarch’s Hellish Cures for Ardiaeus: The Myth of Thespesius and the Occlusion of Plato’s ‘Incurables,’” for the “Greek Political Thought” panel of the 2019 Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting in San Diego.

Olivia Hopewell gave her talk “The Ethics of Reading Autobiography” on the ethical stakes of the reception of Augustine’s Confessions and Dhouda’s Liber Manualis at the 2018 meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Southern Section in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Mary Somerville presented her paper “Statius' Hypsipyle and Second-Stage Warfare in the Thebaid" at the Graduate Goup end-of-term celebration on December 13. Mary also presented this paper at the 2018 meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Southern Section in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Christie Villareal gave the talk “Arma virginis cano: An Allegorical Review of Vergil’s Camilla” at the Classical Association of the Atlantic States Fall meeting in Philadelphia in early October. Christie also presented her talk “All that Glitters: Metallic Imagery in Euripides’ Electra” at the 2018 meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Southern Section in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

History of Art

Over the summer, Mechella Yezernitskaya and Laurel McLaughlin co-curated and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia, PA. Mechella and Laurel published an online exhibition catalogue of SWARM. and participated in a public conversation with artists from SWARM. Didier William and Nestor Armando Gil/Taller Workshop, entitled “Building Community in Diaspora” at PAFA in August.

Nina Blomfield completed her graduate internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing where she assisted with research for an exhibition of Tiffany & Company silverware scheduled for 2020. In October, Nina presented her talk “Papered Over: Japanese Aesthetics in a Nineteenth-Century Maine Interior,” and participated in the International Graduate Student Workshop at the symposium hosted by University of Delaware and Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library.

Elena Gittleman presented her paper “Performative Spaces of Martyrdom and Sainthood: Architecture and Gesture in the Menologion of Basil II" at the Graduate Group end-of-term celebration on December 13.

Tessa Haas co-curated the exhibition, , on view in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art’s Works on Paper gallery from October 2 –December 16. Tessa collaborated on the exhibition with BMC student Abi Lua (UG ’19) and fellow intern and UCSB ’17 alum Liam Bailey.

Meg Hankel was a contributing writer for , edited by Marni Shindelman and Anne Leighton Massoni and released by Routledge in October. Meg presented her paper "Fire, Poetry, Cinema and the Hazy Nature of Resistance: Visual Strategies in Tony Harrison’s Prometheus (1998)" at the German Studies Association Conference in Pittsburgh, PA on September 27-30 and shared her research at the Graduate Group end-of-term celebration on December 13.

Taylor Hobson presented his paper "Expanded Cinemas and Reconfigure Theaters: Douglas Gordon's Projected Spaces," at the symposium “Storytelling as Power, Resistance, Critique: A graduate and undergraduate symposium inspired by the work of Tania El Khoury” at ������̳ on November 9.

Justinne Lake-Jedzinak will begin her spring 2019 Research Residency at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, supported by the Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities. This an initiative founded through the University of Texas at Dallas.

Emily Leifer collaborated with University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. Candidate Jeffrey Katzin on hosted by High Tide Gallery in Philadelphia. This group show featured multi-media work by second year UPenn MFA students Zach Hill, Xiaoxuan Liu, and E. Aaron Ross.

Laurel McLaughlin was Curatorial Assistant for , at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, curated by Jodi Throckmorton and Lauren Schell Dickens. The retrospective will travel to San José Museum of Art, Fowler Museum of Art at UCLA, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN, and Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC. Laurel assisted with object and chronology research, catalog editing, installation organization, and loan facilitation and published "Chronology," in the catalog Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2018. Laurel gave invited lectures on Rina Banerjee’s work for Professor Jennifer Zarro’s course Race, Identity, and Experience in American Art, at Temple University and at Rina Banerjee Scholar's Day (forthcoming, December), at PAFA.

This fall, Laurel held the Ridgway Curatorial Fellowship in ������̳’s Special Collections, where she planned an interdisciplinary series of programs and a graduate/undergraduate symposium concerning the themes of memory, diaspora, and migration in the work of Tania El Khoury. She assisted with the exhibition  and managed a group of 9 paid undergraduate interns working on the residency . In the spring, Laurel will be the Ridgway Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, working with Curator Alex Klein on an upcoming Fall 2019 exhibition, Electronic Arts Intermix catalog, and I is for Institute transcriptions for publication.

Laurel McLaughlin and Curator/Academic Liaison for Art & Artifacts Carrie Robbins, will present "Learning from Tania El Khoury's ear-whispered at ������̳," as part of the panel "When Home Won't Let you Stay: Art & Migration in the 21st Century" at the College Art Association Annual Conference, February 13-16, New York.

Michelle Smiley began her term as a Wyeth Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.

Nava Streiter received a Student Travel Grant from the International Center of Medieval Art to facilitate research visits to manuscripts in Paris and Istanbul this winter.

Arielle Winnik presented her research “Understanding Clothing in Heaven: Local Maronite Burial Practices in the 13th century CE” at the 2018 Textile Society of America Symposium, where she was awarded the Textile Society of America's Student/New Professional Award, presented to students and new professionals in the textiles field who demonstrate exceptional promise for the future.

Mechella Yezernitskaya has been conducting dissertation research in Moscow with the Fanny Bullock Workman Travel Fellowship. In November, Mechella presented a talk titled “Battle in Three Spheres: Olga Rozanova, the Great War, and the Illustrated Book” at the three-day interdisciplinary conference Artistic Expressions and the Great War: A Hundred Years On marking the centennial of the end of World War I at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. Later in the month, Mechella also gave an invited talk titled “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste: The Art of the Russian Avant-Garde” at The Museum of Russian Art (TMORA) in Minneapolis, MN in conjunction with the exhibition From Nonconformism to Feminisms: Russian Women Artists from the Kolodzei Foundation. In December, Mechella presents her paper “Emotionality, the Great War, and the Illustrated Book: Olga Rozanova and Aleksei Kruchenykh’s 1916 War” on a panel as well as her additional research on the collector Christian Brinton on a roundtable on collecting Russian art at the 50th annual Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies convention in Boston, MA.

Mathematics

Isaac Craig attended the Mathematical and Science Research Institute Summer Graduate School on Homotopy Principles at the Tambara Institute in Gunma Prefecture, Japan. Isaac successfully defended his MA “On Fibering 3-Manifolds" in May and his preliminary qualification exams in November. In June he attended the in Algebra, Geometry, and Topology at Temple University. Isaac also participated in the in Atlanta in June.

Lindsay Dever spoke at the CUNY Graduate Center Study Group in Number Theory, with the talk "The Trace Formula in Hyperbolic 3-Space." She also attended the at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.

Elsa Magness gave the paper “Quadratic Reciprocity and The Goldwasser Micali Encryption Scheme” at the Series on Exploring Combinatorics and Number Theory conference at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA in November.

Hannah Schwartz was a visiting researcher at the Max Plank Institute in Bonn, Germany this semester. In June, she gave the paper the “" at the “” conference at Princeton University and attended the in Algebra, Geometry, and Topology at Temple University. In July, Hannah gave the paper “” at “” symposium at the University of Texas, Austin. In October, Hannah was invited to give the paper “” at the “Conference on Knotted Surfaces and 4-Manifolds" at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She at the University of California, Davis Math Geometry/Topology Seminar, . In November, Hannah presented research on "Modular Forms in the Hyperbolic Plane" at the Series on Exploring Combinatorics and Number Theory conference at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA. Hannah recently published her paper co-authored with Math Professor Paul Melvin and others "” in the journal Advances in Mathematics (341). She posted her completed papers "" and "" to arXiv.org, which have been submitted for publication.

Danielle Smiley became Full Time Instructor in Mathematics at Villanova University.

Dan White published the paper “” in the International Journal of Mathematics (29). He also presented an excerpt of this paper to the Philadelphia Area Number Seminar at ������̳ in November. Also in November, he gave the talk “Power Moments of Dirichlet L-functions" at the Series on Exploring Combinatorics and Number Theory conference at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA. In June he attended the Hausdorff School conference in Bonn, Germany which was co-organized by Math Associate Professor Djordje Milićević. He is currently teaching the “Introduction to L-functions I, II, III, IV” to the Graduate Student Number Theory Seminar throughout the fall.

Physics

Carlos Cartagena presented on at the 60th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics in Portland, Oregon. Carlos’s work was also presented at the meeting by Professor David Schaffner as part of “.” Carlos also passed his preliminary examinations this fall.

Andy Clark gave a poster presentation at the CEMB (Center for Engineering Mechanobiology) 2018 Mechanobiology Symposium hosted by the University of Pennsylvania. His poster was entitled “Fabrication and characterization of ultra-soft PDMS based magnetorheological elastomers.” Andy also collaborated with physicists at UPenn on the project proposal, “Magnetobiology: A Smart Material for Dynamic Manipulation of Cells, Tissues, and Organisms," which was accepted by the CEMB Trainee Pilot Grant Program 2018 and awarded $10,000.

Amy Smock worked in Professor May Cheng's lab during the summer, where she researched the development of a magnetic field control for magnetorheological elastomers. In July, Amy attended the Center for Engineering Mechanobiology (CEMB) retreat at Swarthmore College where she helped to present a poster made by the XMC research group. Amy also presented a seminar for the research group on magnetorheological elastomers and magnetic field control design and simulation using COMSOL Multiphysics and finite element analysis methods.

Psychology

Stefanie Poulos-Hopkins successfully defended her doctoral dissertation Couple to Family: The Evolution of Couples’ Marital Satisfaction, Intimacy and Growth During Transition to Parenthood