Notes on Contributors
Sasha Goldman is a Ph.D. Candidate at Boston University. Her research focuses on Italian art and exhibition histories in the 20th and 21st centuries, with particular interests in artist-driven publications and exhibition catalogues, and temporary exhibitions and fairs. Her dissertation situates the artwork of Italian contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) in relation to the work of three seminal figures who are representative of major phases in recent Italian art, revealing how the shared strategies of Cattelan and his precursors demonstrate the fundamental role that history and national identity play in the work of Italian artists across the twentieth century.
Mariah Gruner is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Boston University, where she has also earned a certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. She is currently working on her dissertation, titled “Stitching Selfhood, Materializing Gender: The Political Uses of Women’s Decorative Needlework in the United States, 1820-1920.” She also serves as the program coordinator for the Boston University Public Humanities Undergraduate Fellowship Program.
Anni Pullagura is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at Brown University. Her dissertation, “Seeing Feeling: The Work of Empathy in Exhibitionary Spaces,” explores the intersection of moral philosophy and visual culture in contemporary art and media. Currently, she is the Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
Althea Ruoppo is a Ph.D. student studying modern and contemporary art in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. Her research interests include postwar German art, trauma and the temporality and materiality of memory, and theories of repetition and reproduction.
Kate Sunderlin is a Ph.D. candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University currently writing her dissertation on the use of plaster in the nineteenth-century United States. She and her husband also own and operate the B. A. Sunderlin Bellfoundry in Ruther Glen, VA.
Julia Wilson is a photographic artist, who explores our relationship to, and the relationship between text and image, and photographic interpretation within contemporaneity. Using the large format view camera, Julia photographs images, words, reflections, and grit, composed on her personal computer screen. Julia received a Bachelor of Arts in Classical Studies with a concentration in Latin and Ancient Greek translation from the University of Virginia and recently received her Master of Fine Arts in photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Alex Yen is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University where she specializes in Roman art and archaeology. Her dissertation, “The Door Motif in Roman art: 100BCE-235CE” examines how Romans commonly represented and interpreted the image of the door across media as a symbol of physical and social mobility.