• Ong, Sophie

Sophie Ong is a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University specializing in northern European art of the late Middle Ages under the supervision of Dr. Laura Weigert. She received her B.A. cum laude with high honors in Art History from Smith College, where she also minored in Chemistry and completed the Museums Concentration with a focus on art conservation. Her dissertation, “Hanging on the Body: Pendants, Materiality, and Touch in the Late Middle Ages,” interrogates the relationship between late medieval jeweled pendants, touch, and the body by examining the multi-layered significance of 14th- and 15th-century pendants as valued, personal pieces of jewelry that often straddle the line between the secular and the sacred. Her research has received funding from the International Center of Medieval Art, the Mellon Foundation, and Rutgers University. She has interned in several museums across the US including The Cloisters, The Frick Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smith College Museum of Art, and the Zimmerli Art Museum. Sophie currently holds a Samuel H. Kress History of Art Institutional Fellowship (2017-2019) at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris.