Emily Beeber explores early American Jewish identity

Curatorial track Ph.D. candidate Emily Beeber is a 2025-26 Tyson Scholar at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. This fellowship supports Beeber’s dissertation project, which explores portraiture and Jewish identity in the Atlantic world. At Crystal Bridges, she is focusing on a group of portraits that depicts three generations of the Levy-Franks family, a Jewish family that resided in New York in the early 18th century. She places these works in dialogue with the surviving correspondence of Abigail Levy Franks, whose letters offer crucial insight into the lives of Jewish women in colonial America. Emily has also contributed to curatorial conversations regarding the reinstallation of these paintings in the museum’s permanent collection galleries.

Tizianna Capizzi publishes paper

Doctoral student Tiziana Capizzi recently published a paper in the biannual publication by the Design History Foundation and DHub Design Hub Barcelona. The paper, titled “The Young Cubs: Leopard Print and 18th-Century Dandyism,” explores the leopard print craze of the latter half of the 18th century, when young men scandalized British society with their leopard print garments.

Yoo Jin Choi hosts guest lecture

Curatorial track doctoral candidate Yoo Jin Choi's recent work explores the lesser-known histories of Korean textiles by situating them within broader conversations around Asian art, collecting and display. As chair of the Graduate Student Group in Asian Studies at UD, Yoo Jin collaborated with the Department of Art History and fellow graduate students to organize a guest lecture by Pengliang Lu, Brooke Russell Astor Curator of Chinese Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The event, "Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900" on March 5, 2025, fostered interdisciplinary dialogue on Asian material culture and historiography. Yoo Jin also presented two papers on transcultural history of Korean textiles to international and scholarly audiences.

On November 26, 2025, she was invited to present at the International History of East Asia Seminar at the University of Oxford. Her talk, “The Woven Other: Understanding the Western Missionary Collection of Korean Textiles, 1880–1910,” analyzed American missionary perspectives on Korean textile culture through archival records and a case study of the Eli Barr Landis collection at the Penn Museum. In December 2025, she published “Highlights from the Korean Collection at the Textile Museum” in the centennial volume of The Textile Museum Journal and presented the paper at the journal’s symposium. Her article introduces the breadth of the museum's Korean collection through rank badges, tapestries and modern garments, combining formal analysis and provenance research to contextualize these works within the complex history of Korean and Asian textiles.

Victoria Kenyon examines cartomancy

In summer 2025, doctoral student Victoria S. Kenyon conducted research for her dissertation at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass. Supported by a Jay and Deborah Last Fellowship, which funds research on American art, visual culture or other projects that make substantial use of graphic materials as primary sources, Kenyon took advantage of the Antiquarian Society's vast holdings and considered a wide variety of objects, from children's books to specialized card decks, prints and pamphlets. Kenyon's project, "Stacking the Deck: Fortune-Telling Cards and American Identity in the Long Nineteenth Century," examines the complex history of cartomancy—fortune-telling with cards—in the United States. Approaching the inexpensive and widespread material culture of cartomancy as both a popular amusement and a reflection of alternative/Occult mysticism, Kenyon argues that the practice and imagery of fortune-telling can reveal important layers of the construction of American social, political and religious identity throughout the early history of the United States. Time at AAS allowed Kenyon to complete foundational primary research and learn from a community of fellow scholars.

Molly Martien studies enslaved craftspeople

Curatorial track doctoral candidate Molly Martien studies enslaved craftspeople who labored on plantation sites in the Chesapeake region during the long 19th century. In the past three years she has presented original research at the 2024 Conrad M. Hall Symposium for Virginia History in Richmond, Va., partook in Winterthur, Museum, Garden and Library's study abroad trip to England, and interned at the Baltimore Museum of Art as a research assistant for an upcoming exhibition on the senses and art.

Thomas Price joins Joslyn Art Museum

Doctoral candidate Thomas Price joined the Joslyn Art Museum as the new Richard and Mary Holland Assistant Curator of Western American Art. His move to Omaha follows fellow Blue Hen Thomas Busciglio-Ritter, who held the position previously. Price also presented a paper titled “Subterranean Imagination: Mining Manhood at the Comstock Lode” at the 114th Annual College Art Association Conference in Chicago in February 2026. The talk, adapted from the second chapter of his dissertation, explores the representation of miners laboring at the Comstock Lode in Nevada between the 1860s and 1880s. Prints and photographs from the period frequently associated their identities with the rocky earth, transforming the workers into the very commodities they extracted. Tom also presented his work at the 30th Annual Graduate Student Symposium at the Barnes Foundation in early March 2026, where he presented his paper “Superfluous Vitality: The Ironworkers’ Noontime and the Erotics of Extraction.” Both presentations spring from his dissertation, Body Work: Masculinity and Extraction in Late Nineteenth-Century American Art, which examines the presentation of masculine identity in the visual culture of natural resource extraction, and which he successfully defended in March 2026.

Xiaomeng Sun presents research at Institute of Qing History

Doctoral student Xiaomeng Sun had the honor of sharing his research on the Auspicious Tree (circa 1750) at a symposium held by the Institute of Qing History, Renmin University of China, in the summer of 2025. There he discussed how Emperor Qianlong’s vision of territorial expansion was mapped onto the commissioning and production of state art. He also honed his archival research skills and expanded his academic horizon under the guidance of the director of the Institute of Qing History, Hongliu Kan.

Genevieve Westerby presents at Dallas Museum of Art

Genevieve Westerby, curatorial track doctoral candidate, primarily continued work on her dissertation, a study of late-19th century French landscapes in the context of river engineering and its environmental effects. In the fall she was invited to give a talk at the Dallas Museum of Art in conjunction with their exhibition The Impressionist Revolution from Monet to Matisse, and in the spring, she was interviewed by the Denver Art Museum for an audio guide that accompanied their exhibition The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro's Impressionism. Westerby also wrote a book review that was published in the spring edition of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and an essay for the catalogue accompanying the National Gallery of Singapore's exhibition Into the Modern: Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.