In Memoriam: Andrew J. Cosentino

The late art historian Andrew J. Cosentino (1931–2024) earned his Ph.D. in art history in 1976 from the University of Delaware, teaching for several years at Franklin & Marshall College before accepting a 1980–81 Smithsonian Institution Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Collection of Fine Arts (NCFA, now the Smithsonian American Art Museum). Among other achievements, he is recognized at the Smithsonian and beyond for curating the exhibitions The Paintings of Charles Bird King 1785–1862 in 1977 and The Capital Image: Painters in Washington, 1800–1915 in 1983 for the NCFA. Read Dr. Cosentino’s obituary.

Anne Cross

Anne Cross, Ph.D. ’23, was appointed assistant teaching professor of American art at Penn State University. A specialist in American art of the 19th and 20th centuries, Cross co-curated the exhibition Jazz Age Illustration at the Delaware Art Museum, October 2024 – January 2025.

Carolanne Deal

Since graduating from UD’s 4+1 program in Art History for Museum Professionals, Carolanne Deal, M.A. ‘19, has held positions at the Delaware Historical Society, State of Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs (HCA), the Rehoboth Art League and, most recently, the Brandywine Museum of Art. In 2022, Deal was hired as lead researcher on HCA’s groundbreaking “LGBTQ+ History of Delaware: We Have Always Been Here” Research & Digital Engagement project. 

Prior to this project, there was minimal historical research published on the state’s LGBTQ+ community, so Deal’s research was unprecedented. She conducted oral history interviews with 30 members of Delaware’s queer community, using their lived experiences as primary source evidence. They also performed research at local archives like University of Delaware Special Collections, William Way LGBT Center, John J. Wilcox Jr. Archives, and Delaware Public Archives. The year-long research project culminated in an online archive highlighting some people, locations and objects of Delaware’s queer history. 

Deal continues to do queer history research as an independent researcher and educator, posting the stories and images on @DelawareQueerHistory, an Instagram account they created in 2023. In February 2024, Deal was hired as associate registrar at the Brandywine Museum of Art. In this role, they assist with the preservation, documentation, research and exhibition of the museum’s incredible American Art Collection. Recently, Deal stewarded the Nathaniel Wyeth miniature collection, which was displayed during the holidays as part of the Wonderful World of Wyeth Miniatures exhibition at Brandywine. 

Nikki A. Greene

Nikki A. Greene, Ph.D. ’09, associate professor of art history at Wellesley College, published Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and The Sonic in Contemporary Black Art (Duke University Press, 2024). It was selected by Hyperallergic as one of the top 30 art books of 2024. 

In 2024–25, Greene curated Taking the White Gloves Off: A Performance Art Series in Honor of Lorraine O'Grady, which featured seven multidisciplinary artists to accompany the exhibition Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. She curates the series next at the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College Museum of Art during the 2025–26 academic year.

Nenette Luarca-Shoaf

Nenette Luarca-Shoaf, Ph.D. ’12, has been appointed the Nadine and Robert A. Skotheim Director of Education and Public Engagement at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, effective March 31, 2025. Read the announcement in The Huntington.

Anna Marley

Anna Marley, P.h.D ’09, has joined the Toledo Museum of Art as the director of curatorial affairs. Prior to joining the team in Toledo, Marley, a scholar of art and material culture of the Americas and the British Atlantic world from the colonial era to 1945, curated more than 16 exhibitions as the Kenneth R. Woodcock Curator of Historical American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

William Morgan

Architectural historian and photographer William Morgan, Ph.D. ’71, has published two new books. Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States (2023), traces the entire arc of Collegiate Gothic, from its first emergence at campuses like Kenyon and Bowdoin to its apotheosis in James Gamble Rogers’s intricately detailed confections at Yale. The Cape Cod Cottage (2025), follows the uniquely American house type from its earliest beginnings in the colonial period, through its spread across New England, to its embrace as a suburban ideal in the twentieth century, and its reinterpretation by contemporary architects. 

Julia Mun

Julia Mun, M.A. ‘23, a graduate of UD’s 4+1 program in Art History for Museum Professionals, is currently assistant curator at Art Bridges Foundation. She works with museum partners nationwide to help place works from the collection and increase access to important art of the American experience to communities everywhere. She has a show at the Bruce Museum titled Isamu Noguchi: Metal the Mirror, which features nine galvanized steel sculptures by Isamu Noguchi and explores how he engaged with complicated structures of duality that have come to define Asian American identities and experiences. It runs through November 2025.

Kristen Nassif

Kristen Nassif, Ph.D., ’22, has been appointed curator of collections at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Rachelle B. Pablo

Rachelle B. Pablo, M.A. ’21 (Navajo Nation), a veteran of the U.S. Armed Services, was appointed museum specialist for the National Native American Veterans Memorial at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. 

Jeffrey Richmond-Moll

As George Putnam Curator of American Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, Ph.D. ’19, is about to open a major exhibition, Making History: 200 Years of American Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in June 2025. He is also hard at work on a major exhibition and book titled Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone, co-organized by the Georgia Museum of Art and supported by grants from the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Henry Luce Foundation, which will open in February 2026. He curated two additional exhibitions that opened at his previous post, the Georgia Museum of Art, in 2024: Joel Sternfeld: When It Changed and Kei Ito: Staring at the Face of the Sun, winner of an award for best exhibition from the Georgia Association of Museums in 2025. He also published an essay based on his dissertation research, "'Within Arm’s Reach': The Holy Land through the Stereoscope, ca. 1900," in the summer/autumn 2024 issue of Winterthur Portfolio. 

Rachael Vause

Rachael Vause, Ph.D., ’23, began a position as assistant professor of art history and museum studies at Kennesaw State University in the fall of 2024. In line with her focus on object-based learning, Vause incorporated activities into her art history classes such as ink-making, quill-cutting, ruling and illumination on parchment, and painting with egg tempera on wood. Future activities for her course include a visit to the Bentley Rare Books Library and student-led digital exhibitions of daily life from the late antique and early medieval periods. 

Hands-on approaches like these have made the art and the material culture of the past, and present, tangible to students, and they have connected students more intimately with various histories and cultural moments. Vause has been grateful for her warm reception at KSU and looks forward to bringing the ancient and medieval worlds to life for students of the American South. She also looks forward to continuing her own research in Merovigian material culture as a part of her on-going book project. 

This July, Vause will give papers on the material culture shared between women of the kingdoms of England and Francia at the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds and at a workshop titled, “Overlapping identities? Abbots and abbesses within and without the cloister, c. 600–c. 1200” at the University of Manchester.

Rachel A. Zimmerman

Rachel A. Zimmerman, Ph.D. ‘17, was promoted to associate professor with tenure and became chair of the Department of Art & Creative Media at Colorado State University Pueblo.