News

The Honors Program in Art History at Rutgers University provides outstanding students with the opportunity to pursue independent, sustained research culminating in a senior thesis. Over the course of the academic year, students work closely with faculty advisors to develop and refine original scholarship. The Honors Symposium celebrates the fruit of this hard work, bringing together students, faculty, and guests for a public presentation of their undergraduate research.   Special thanks to Jenevieve...

Julia Katz, a PhD student in Art History, was awarded the University and Bevier Fellowship from SAS to complete the writing of her dissertation, “Circe’s Wand: Reimagining Antiquities in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800."  Catherine Puglisi is her supervisor.  Warm congratulations to Julia! 

Jack Lehan, an art history major who will also be getting a Master's in CHAPs, presented a paper titled "Investigating the Origins of the Natural History Society at Rutgers University by Uncovering the History of the Antler Exhibit."  Jack is an art history major who has completed internships at the Geology Museum.  He presented the paper at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America North Eastern Section 

Zeki Furkan Sarilican, 3rd-year PhD student, received the 2025 Graduate Student Prize from Ottoman & Turkish Studies Association (OTSA) with his paper titled “Fashioning the Bektashi Self: Visual Culture and Sacred Identity in the Ottoman Empire.”

Meredith Arms Bzdak (LEFT), Sue Shutte, and Sara Quinlan have taken up important roles in Historic Preservation Meredith Arms Bzdak, an architectural historian, is a Partner with Mills + Schnoering Architects (Princeton, NJ | Philadelphia, PA). She was recently elected President of  Docomomo US, the United States chapter of Docomomo International, a non-profit organization dedicated to the documentation and conservation of buildings and sites of the modern movement.  She holds a PhD in Art...

Kimiko Matsumura (Rutgers Art History PhD 2019, assistant professor at Lake Forest College) won a Fellowship from Lake Forest to explore AI in teaching. Her project explores the strengths and weaknesses of AI as an art historical collaborator in object research and curatorial practice. Applying computer vision to artworks in the Lake Forest College collection, the study seeks to reveal how LLMs interpret novel or lesser-known objects compared to canonical examples, its current biases, and the...

We are delighted to share that our former graduate, Nandita Punj, has co-edited a newly published volume of MARG (Modern Architectural Research Group) together with Professor Phyllis Granoff (Retired Emerita, Religious Studies, Yale). Founded in 1946, MARG: A Magazine of the Arts has long been a leading platform for groundbreaking research in Indian art and architecture. While primarily scholarly, the magazine’s essays are accessible to the wider public. The new volume, The Worlds of Jain Art:...

We congratulate Giorgi "George" Papashvili, PhD Candidate and graduate assistant at the Zimmerli Art Museum, for his work as editor of the recent publication of Niko Pirosmanashvili: A Study of His Life and Art by the Unicorn Publishing Group (UK) in 2024. The book was compiled by an artist, Tengiz Mirzashvili (1934-2008) and a graphic designer, Arkady Troyanker (1937-2025). It includes old and new contributions from art historical writers and others, as well as archival materials. Dedicated...

The American Academy in Rome announced today the winners of the 2025–26 Rome Prize, the rigorous competition supporting innovative fellows in the arts, humanities, and sciences. The Samuel H. Kress Foundation | Millicent Mercer Johnsen Rome Prize is awarded to Margo Weitzman to support her work in Renaissance & Early Modern Studies. The Rome Prize equips artists and scholars with the time, space, setting, and colleagues to explore and create in the singular city of Rome. The 35 recipients will...

Dr. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann: “Modes and Approaches to Global Art History / Geohistory of Art” April 24th, 5:30–7:00 pm EST Graduate Studies Conference Room, Art Library 71 Hamilton St. Zoom registration link: https://tinyurl.com/AHGSO Although anti-globalization sentiments may now be on the rise, globalization has long been a buzzword and a subject of intense debate. In its most general sense, globalization refers to worldwide phenomena of exchange and communication. Noteworthy symposia,...

Emma Oslé has been selected to receive the 2025 Outstanding Doctoral Student Award from the School of Graduate Studies (SGS). This is one of four extremely prestigious awards granted by SGS for excellence in doctoral research and scholarship across the disciplines.

Julia Rose Katz is the 2025 Anthony M. Clark Rome Prize Fellow in Renaissance and early modern studies. She is also a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University. Her research explores how early modern artists and restorers creatively reimagined damaged ancient sculptures, transforming them with new forms and meanings. Like Circe’s mythical magic, these interventions altered antiquities through inventive restorations that reflected contemporary politics, intellectual...

We are proud to announce that Kailtin Booher (PhD 20203) has been appointed the William and Sarah Ross Soter Associate Curator of Photography at the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA), where she will lead the museum’s efforts to steward, expand, and reinterpret its collection of photography and lens-based art, while building a rigorous and dynamic program of exhibitions relating to these media. She joins the musem after serving as the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow in the Department of...

Early modern painting was the ultimate metamedium, capable of describing a vast array of objects on a two-dimensional plane. Or so it seems. Depictions of books, in particular, provide a locus for understanding painters’ nuanced relationships to tangible real-world things. This talk will investigate the verisimilitude of books in the art of Jan van Eyck and his contemporaries, relying on the newly launched Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art (BASIRA) database to compare and contrast. What is...

Artivism: Art History and Heritage in Global Conflict 15th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium Keynote speaker: Dr. Elisabeth Friedman. Associate Professor, Art History & Visual Culture, Illinois State University In times of warfare and political conflict, art inspires and comforts. Art challenges official narratives and humanizes violence. Art liberates, and expresses the inexpressible. For these reasons, artworks, museums, archaeology sites, and other heritage sites are routinely...

Oksana Semenik has been working to reclassify Ukrainian art she sees as wrongly identified as Russian, a campaign she conducted during her time at the Zimmerli Museum. Read more in The New York Times. ‘Decolonizing’ Ukrainian Art, One Name-and-Shame Post at a Time - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Emma Oslé is the recipient of the Big 10 Academic Alliance/Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship in American Art  Administered by: The Smithsonian American Art Museum Time period: 2024-2025 Academic Year Congratulations, Emma!

Sascha T. Scott, Modern Pueblo Painting: Colonization, Aesthetic Agency, and Indigenous Visual Sovereignty Scott is an associate professor of art history at Syracuse University, where she is also faculty in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program. Prof. Scott is an award-winning scholar whose work on both Indigenous and settler art is framed by ethical imperatives and conceptual frameworks central to Indigenous studies. A New Foundation for Art History Fellowship will support the...