Notes About Contributors
Rebecca Arnheim is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Boston University. Previously, she received her BA and MA in History of Art from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Diploma in Curatorial and Museum Studies from Tel Aviv University. She is currently working on her dissertation, “Ephemera Made Permanent: Collection and Display of Portrait Drawings in Early Modern Italy,” which focuses on highly finished portrait drawings and the circumstances of their creation, commission, purchase, collection, and display from the mid-fifteenth century to the late-sixteenth century.
Tobah Aukland-Peck is a fifth-year PhD student in Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her dissertation research focuses on images of extraction (including mines, miners, and mining infrastructure) in interwar Britain. She locates the figure of the miner as an alter-ego for the artist, tracing the way in which both instances of labor are engaged with the translation of landscape and raw material into productive commodities.
Bailey Benson is a fourth-year PhD candidate at Boston University in the History of Art & Architecture Department. Her dissertation, entitled “In the Eye of the Beholder: Memory, Identity, and the Role of Viewer Reception in Roman Imperial Portraiture, 193-284 CE,” investigates the changing memory landscape of the Roman Empire during the third century and the role that imperial portraiture played in crafting and articulating individual commemoration and memory formation. She has held positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Princeton University Art Museum.
Willie Granston is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the History of Art & Architecture Department at Boston University, where his studies focus on American architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His dissertation, “‘Like it Growed There’: Resort Architecture and the New England Landscape, 1875-1915” considers how environment awareness and anxieties relating to the landscape influenced the design, construction, and reception of New England’s late nineteenth-century resort buildings. He obtained a BA from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and has an MA from the University of Delaware, where he studied in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture.
Rachel Kase is a fourth-year PhD candidate at Boston University, specializing in seventeenth-century Dutch painting with advisor Michael Zell. She received her M.A. from the History of Art & Architecture Department at Boston University in 2017. She has held positions in the Art of Europe department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Old Master Paintings at Sotheby’s in New York, and at the Philips Collection in Washington, D.C. Her dissertation, entitled “Against the Rising Tide: Picturing Severe Weather and a Changing Landscape in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands,” takes an ecocritical approach to seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting.
Mingqian Liu is a PhD candidate from the Department of Architecture and Center for Heritage Conservation at Texas A&M University. She also works as a Graduate Assistant for the College of Architecture Diversity Council and Center for Teaching Excellence at Texas A&M. Her research interests include architectural and urban history, historic preservation, heritage tourism, and public education in museums. Mingqian held an M.A. in History of Art and Architecture from Boston University, and a B.A. in International Studies from the University of Iowa.
Phillippa Pitts is a PhD student and Horowitz Foundation Fellow for American Art at Boston University. Her research questions the presentation of ‘American’ identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, examining the ways in which these constructions are underpinned by ideas of expansion, immigration, and xenophobia, as well as discourses of indigeneity. Before returning to doctoral work, Phillippa worked in museum exhibitions, interpretation and technology for almost a decade, and remains passionate about equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the arts. Phillippa’s work has been generously supported by grants and fellowships from CASVA, the Kress Foundation, and the Center for American Art, among others.
Amanda Thompson is a PhD candidate at the Bard Graduate Center working in Native American arts and critical craft studies. Her dissertation research is tentatively entitled “Florida Seminole and Miccosukee Patchwork: Craft, Sovereignty, and the Mediation of Settler Colonial Encounters, ca. 1918- present.” Before returning to research, Amanda spent fifteen years working in museum collection and exhibition management at institutions including the New-York Historical Society, the Museum for African Art, and The Jewish Museum. She currently sits on the Board of Directors and chairs the Collections Committee of the Tomaquag Museum, Rhode Island’s only Indigenous museum. Amanda is a 2020-2021 Smithsonian American Art Museum Research Fellow and her dissertation research has been generously funded by the American Philosophical Society.