López wins CASVA's Wyeth Fellowship
Janina López was awarded a twenty-four month Wyeth Fellowship, a prestigious predoctoral fellowship from the National Art Gallery's Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), to support her dissertation research on the Royal Chicano Air Force, an artist collective based in Sacramento, California, exploring their role as artist-educators in the changing educational environment of 1970s Northern California.
Bertagnolli takes "Art! With Dr. Ike, Ph.D." to Tinworks Art
Isaiah Bertagnolli (Ph.D. 2025) has partnered with contemporary art space Tinworks Art in Bozeman, Montana, for the fourth season of "Art! With Dr. Ike, Ph.D." This season will take place once a month from July to October as programming for Tinworks' exhibit "Chisel and Razor Acts I & II." This exhibit features contemporary artists responding to the legacy of sculptor Edmonia Lewis and her brother Samuel, who was a barber and community leader in Bozeman.
Tao and Colleague Publish on Oracle Bones in Collection of Allen Memorial Art Museum
Tao and his colleague conducted a paleography and textual analysis on two late Shang dynasty (12-11th century BCE) oracle bone fragments (AMAM1962.20A & B) that are currently in the collection of Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. They found that both fragments originated from the "Dalian Keng 大連坑 Pit" during the third archaeological excavation of Yinxu 殷墟, and was donated to Oberlin College in 1962 by Grace Goodrich Smith.
Nakhaei begins Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship at the National Museum of Asian Art
PhD candidate Hossein Nakhaei has joined the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art (NMAA) as a Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellow. This fellowship will support work on his dissertation, “Luminous Past, Fragmented Present: Persian Luster Tiles from Sacred Architecture to Museum Galleries,” which interrogates narratives forged by Western art markets, museums, and scholarship and adopts a reparative approach that re-situates luster tiles within the spatial, cultural, and ecological contexts in which they were made and experienced.
Hosseini Publishes on Platform
Infrastructure is usually invisible, until it is gone or stops working. Writing in Platform, Assistant Professor Sahar Hosseini takes the 2026 US-Israeli war on Iran as the occasion to ask what infrastructure actually is, and to whom it belongs. It argues that the language of war performs a deliberate act of stripping infrastructure of its human dimensions and obscuring devastations imposed on ordinary people.
Eppihimer Interviews UK Poet Laureate About Translating Gilgamesh
Before Simon Armitage's visit to the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, Melissa Eppihimer interviewed him for the Pittsburgh Review of Books. The topic of conversation was Armitage's new translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's oldest poem. Armitage, poet laureate of the United Kingdom, teaches poetry at the University of Leeds and is an experienced translator of historical poetry. Their discussion examined the pleasures and challenges of translating the epic, the text's connections to the modern world, and Armitage's own relationship with it.
Kupfer Awarded 2026 ACLS Fellowship
Award Recognizes Excellence in Humanities and Social Sciences Research
Beranek Publishes First Monograph on Amalia von Solms and Early Modern Dutch Potraiture
Saskia Beranek (PhD, 2013) has published her first monograph, The Cultural Work of the Early Modern Dutch Portrait: Amalia van Solms and the Shape of the Self in European Art (Routledge). In it, Beranek examines how portraits served as powerful tools beyond mere facial records, actively negotiating relationships, building bridges, engendering communities, soothing egos, evoking memories, and constructing fame. Equally as important, however, is that this is the first sustained English-language study of Amalia van Solms.
Smith publishes in Art Journal
Teaching Assistant Professor Deirdre Smith's article exploring the concept of "zoomorphic feminism" in contemporary art was published in April in Art Journal. Through analysis of works by artists Wangechi Mutu, Julie Buffalohead, Marianna Simnett, Agnes Questionmark, and Juliana Huxtable, Smith takes note of a recent phenomenon where artists create and perform hybrid imagery combining feminine human bodies with nonhuman animal bodies as a means to a discourse of gender and identity.
Tao and Colleagues Publish on a Yuan Dynasty Manichaean Cliff Inscription in Fujian, China
Graduate student Yuqing Tao surveyed this stone inscription site, which primarily bears the Manichaean verse:"Purity, Light, Power, Wisdom (清浄光明大力智慧)," along with the year of its completion (1335) and the patron's name. After presenting the survey results, Tao argues that this site extends the known northwestern boundary of Manichaean sites in the southeast coast region of China and provides a rare, reliable, and early spatiotemporal reference for studying the spread of Manichaeism in Fujian during the Yuan Dynasty.
Kumbhardare Speaks at SUNY New Paltz Undergraduate Art History Symposium
Undergraduate student Anuja Kumbhardare is set to speak at the SUNY New Paltz Undergraduate Art History Symposium on Friday, April 10th. Kumbhardare is currently a senior obtaining a BA in Museum Studies and Classics, along with a BS/BA in Human Resource Management.
Smith Publishes in Curator
In March, Deirdre Smith's article, "A Wider View: Amie Siegel's Panorama and the Role of Contemporary Art in Natural History Museum Critique and Practice" was published in the journal Curator. The article is a "Reflective Analysis" inspired by Amie Siegel's 2023 artist's film and Forum Gallery installation at Carnegie Museum of Art, which drew on archival footage shot by Carnegie Museum of Natural History employees during expeditions and diorama construction projects in the 1930s-1970s.
Serrato Doyen Awarded 2026 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art
Graduate student Kale Serrato Doyen has been awarded a 2026 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. The program is made possible by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation and administered by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
Smith Featured in Annual Report on Research at Pitt
Teaching Assistant Professor Deirdre Smith was profiled in the Senior Vice Chancellor for Research's Annual Report