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Graduate Student News (2007 - 2008)

Denise Rae Costanzo

Denise Rae Costanzo, Ph.D. candidate in art history received a Creative Achievement Award from the College of Arts & Architecture. She has had an exceptional record of achievements. Before coming to Penn State, she earned a Bachelor of Environmental Design from Texas A & M University. Her M.A. thesis at Penn State was on "The House of the Griffins, Revisited: Luxury and Taste in Republican Rome" (advisor: Elizabeth J. Walters) and she presented papers based upon it at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and at the Middle Atlantic Symposium on the History of Art at the National Gallery of Art. She is currently completing her Ph.D. dissertation on "The Lessons of Rome: Architects at the American Academy of Rome" (advisor: Craig Zabel). This research has been support by an Institute for the Arts & Humanities Summer Residency, Department of Art History Dissertation Fellowships, a Hyslop Memorial Fellowship, and a Schwartz Research Grant. She has presented papers based on her dissertation at the University of Toronto, the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, and the Middle Atlantic Symposium at the National Gallery. Denise is also a dedicated and accomplished teacher, having taught courses in both the Department of Art History and the Department of Architecture.

Alissa Walls Mazow

Alissa Walls Mazow, Ph.D. candidate in art history received a Creative Achievement Award. She is a Ph.D. candidate in art history who has distinguished herself as a scholar and a teacher. Her dissertation, "Plantae, Animalia, Fungi: Transformations of Natural History in Contemporary American Art," investigates the ways in which contemporary artists employ (and sometimes critique) imagery from 18th and 19th century natural history. While many other graduate students at her stage of training have not yet published, two of Alissa's articles on modern art and architecture have already appeared in periodicals. Not surprisingly, she has been the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including a Penn State Alumni Dissertation Award (for the 2008-2009 year), a 2007 Graduate Student Summer Residency in the Institute for Arts and Humanities, and the nationally competitive Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which has allowed her to study at the Smithsonian in residence this spring. Alissa has presented papers at many prestigious and competitive conferences and symposia as well including the American Studies Association. Alissa also excels as a pedagogue--she is an invaluable TA, and received rave reviews when she taught at Bucknell University for a semester as a visiting instructor last year.

Janalee Emmer

Janalee Emmer, Ph.D. candidate in art history, will be Visiting Faculty member in the Department of Art and Art History at Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, during fall semester 2008. Her dissertation advisor is Dr. Nancy Locke.

Kelema Moses

Kelema Moses, Ph.D. candidate in art history, has received a Diversity Internship with the Pennsylvania State Archives through the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, in partnership with the Pennsylvania Federation of Museums and Historical Organization (May 19-August 8, 2008).

Jennifer K. Cochran

Jennifer K. Cochran, Ph.D. candidate in art history, presented a paper, "Humor and Other Purposes of the Late Medieval 'Profane' Badges," at Here Be Monsters: Beasts, Beastliness and Hybridity in the Long Middle Ages, 3rd Annual Medieval Studies/Pearl Kibre Medieval Study Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, March 28, 2008.

Dan Haxall

Dan Haxall, Ph.D. candidate in art history, published an article, "This tragedy still continues': Esteban Vicente, Robert Motherwell, and the Spanish Civil War," in Montage 2008 an online art history journal produced by The University of Iowa Art History Society. For more information go to http://www.uiowa.edu/~montage/issues/2008/articles.shtml

Janalee Emmer

Janalee Emmer, Ph.D. candidate in art history, has been awarded a 2008 Graduate Student Summer Residency in the Institute for the Arts & Humanities at Penn State. She is completing her dissertation on "Reflections of the Self: Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France." Her dissertation advisor is Dr. Nancy Locke.

Janalee Emmer

Kimberly Ivancovich

Kimberly Ivancovich, Ph.D. candidate in art history, is presenting a paper, "The Multiplicity of Play: Titian's Caricature of the Laocoön," at the South Central Renaissance Conference, Kansas City, Missouri, March 6-8, 2008.

Alissa Walls Mazow

Alissa Walls Mazow, Ph.D. candidate in art history, has been awarded a 2008 Alumni Association Dissertation Award from Penn State. This will assist her in her work on her dissertation, "Plantae, Animalia, Fungi: Transformations of Natural History in Contemporary American Art." Her dissertation advisor is Dr. Sarah K. Rich.

Edit Toth

Edit Toth, Ph.D. candidate in art history, is presenting a paper, "'Adventures of the Signature': Lajos Kassak's Collages, 1920-22," at the Philadelphia Symposium on the History of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, April 5, 2008.

Denise R. Costanzo

Denise R. Costanzo, Ph.D. candidate in art history, is presenting a paper, "Travel, Architects, and the Postwar 'Grand Tour,'" at Constructing Identities, the Annual Graduate Student Conference, University of Toronto, January 18, 2008.

Jennifer H. Noonan

Jennifer H. Noonan, Ph.D. candidate in art history, presented a paper, "The Gates: A Modern Cathedral, a Pilgrimage Site," at the symposium To the Ends of the Earth: Journeys Ancient to Modern, Bryn Mawr College, October 12-13, 2007.

Alissa Walls Mazow

Alissa Walls Mazow, Ph.D. candidate in art history, presented a paper, "Akaloids Meet Acrylic: Entheogens in the Paintings of Fred Tomaselli," at the Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, to be held in Philadelphia, October 11-14, 2007.

Vessela N. Anguelova

Vessela N. Anguelova, Ph.D. candidate in art history, presented a paper, "Zoodochos Pege, St. Michael in Lesnovo and the Serbian Aristocracy," at the Byzantine Studies Conference, to be held at the University of Toronto, October 11-14, 2007.

Sarah Lippert

Sarah Lippert, Ph.D. candidate in art history, will begin a tenure-track faculty position in the Department of Fine Arts, Foreign Languages and Humanities at Louisiana State University Shreveport.

Daniel Haxall

Daniel Haxall, Ph.D. candidate in art history, will be teaching art history as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Buffalo, the State University of New York, 2007-08.

Alissa Walls Mazow

Alissa Walls Mazow, Ph.D. candidate in art history, has published an article "Cy Twombly's Natural History Part I, Mushrooms" in Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review 57 (Spring 2007).

Jennifer Cochran

Jennifer Cochran, Ph.D. candidate in art history, was awarded a 2007 Creative Achievement Award: Jennifer Cochran is a student in the doctoral program in Art History, where she conducts work on medieval Irish sculpture. Prior to coming to Penn State, she received her Bachelor's degree from Kent State and a Master of Letters degree from Trinity College (University of Dublin) in the History of Art and Architecture. During the course of her research on her thesis, she located and documented surviving works of Irish devotional sculpture, many of which were still owned by the families who had become their hereditary keepers. While at Trinity she received several awards and scholarships, taught undergraduate seminars, and was a member of several learned associations, including the Royal Society of Irish Antiquaries. At Penn State, Jennifer has taught discussion sections as well as her own courses, including a self-designed course in Irish art during the spring 2007 semester. In the summer of 2005, she acted as the academic advisor to the Art History undergraduates and as the FTCAP (First-Year Testing, Counseling and Advising Program) advisor for the Art History Department. Since the fall of 2005, she has also served as Art History Graduate Student Representative, a position that entails acting as liaison between the graduate students and Art History faculty. She is also responsible for coordinating the orientation of incoming graduate students, running a yearly teaching assistant seminar for the department's graduate students, and organizing a wide range of events. From 2004-2006, she was the recipient of the Graham Fellowship from the Graduate School at Penn State.

Melissa L. Mednicov

Melissa L. Mednicov, M.A. candidate in art history, was awarded a 2007 Creative Achievement Award: Melissa L. Mednicov received her B.A. from Smith College in 2002, where she was a Mary Maples Dunn Scholar. She spent her senior year studying in Florence, attending courses in at the Smith Center in Piazza della Signoria as well as at the University of Florence. During this time, she also interned at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in several capacities. After graduation, Ms. Mednicov worked at a non-profit organization devoted to improving literacy in the Boston Public Schools. Ms. Mednicov's Master's paper, "Morris Louis Bernstein: Before and After," investigates the ways in which conflicts of identity, particularly Jewish assimilation in the 1950s and 1960s, can be located (or not located) in the artist's abstract paintings. At Penn State, Melissa has been instrumental in the foundation and organization of Flow (now The Graduate Student Association for Visual Culture), an interdisciplinary graduate student group in the College of Arts and Architecture. The goal of this group is to encourage and provide support for interdisciplinary research and collaboration across the boundaries of scholarly disciplines in the College and the University at large. She has worked as a teaching assistant during her two years as a M.A. candidate at Penn State, and has received grants for her research from Louise D. Purcell Memorial Endowment, the Department of Art History and the College of Arts and Architecture. In her future research, Ms. Mednicov will continue to address the challenge of identifying cultural meanings in paintings that have been seen as resistant to interpretation, particularly American abstract works produced during the Cold War period.

Vessela Anguelova

Vessela Anguelova, Ph.D. candidate in art history, has been awarded a fellowship at the American Research Center in Sofia, Bulgaria, during Spring 2008 to work on her dissertation, "Place as Spiritual Experience in Byzantine Art, Ninth to Eighteenth Centuries." Her advisor is Professor Anthony Cutler.

Alissa Mazow

Alissa Mazow, Ph.D. candidate in art history, has been awarded a Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She will be in residency at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, from February 1 to April 30, 2008. Ms. Mazow is completing her dissertation, "Plantae, Animalia, Fungi: Transformations of Natural History in Contemporary American Art." Her advisor is Professor Sarah K. Rich.

Alissa Mazow

Alissa Mazow, Ph.D. candidate in art history, has published an article entitled "'All Safe!': Early Passenger Elevators and the Experience of the Vertical Ride" in Montage (2006-07), "a peer-reviewed on-line journal produced annually by graduate students in art history from across the country and compiled by members of The University of Iowa Graduate Art History Society": http://www.uiowa.edu/~montage/issues/2006/articles.shtml

Alissa Mazow

Alissa Mazow, Ph.D. candidate in art history, has been awarded a 2007 Graduate Student Summer Residency in the Institute for Arts and Humanities, Penn State. At the Institute, she will be researching/writing her dissertation, "Plantae, Animalia, Fungi: Transformations of Natural History in Contemporary American Art." Her advisor is Dr. Sarah K. Rich.

Denise Costanzo

Denise Costanzo, Ph.D. candidate in art history, has been awarded a 2007 Graduate Student Summer Residency in the Institute for Arts and Humanities, Penn State. At the Institute, she will be researching/writing her dissertation, "The Lessons of Rome: Architects at the American Academy, 1947-1966." Her advisor is Dr. Craig Zabel.

Rachel Gratiy

Rachel Gratiy, Ph.D. candidate in art history, presented a paper, "The Construction and Reconstruction of the Sacred Space that is Novgorod's St. Sophia" at the 5th International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities, held at the American University of Paris, Paris, France, July 17-20, 2007.

Denise Costanzo

Denise Costanzo, Ph.D. candidate in art history, presented a paper on, "The American Academy Renewed: Rome, Modernism, and U.S. Architects, 1947-1950," at the Buell Dissertation Colloquium, April 20-21, 2007, sponsored by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University, New York, NY.

Kristin Dean

Kristin Dean, Ph.D. candidate in art history, presented a paper, "Embodied Insanity: Yayoi Kusama, the Fashionable Body and Psychological Enstrangement," at the University of Oregon Art History Association Symposium, Eugene, Oregon, April 20-21, 2007.

Daniel Haxall

Daniel Haxall, Ph.D. candidate in art history, was invited to present a paper on "Lee Krasner's Pastoral Vision: Collage and the Nature of Order" at the Fourth Pollock-Krasner / Stony Brook Conference, April 12-13, 2007, at Stony Brook Manhattan. The conference was called, The Art and Life of Lee Krasner: Recollections, Cultural Context, and New Perspectives. Mr. Haxall is the only student who has been invited to participate in this prestigious conference.

Kimberly Ivancovich

Kimberly Ivancovich, Ph.D. candidate in art history, presented a paper, "The Power of Sight: Photojournalism in the Algerian War," at an international, interdisciplinary conference on The Language of Images, held at Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, Connecticut, March 29-30, 2007.

Jennifer H. Noonan

Jennifer H. Noonan, Ph.D. candidate in art history, presented a paper, "Bruce Connor: What's In a Name?" at the Philadelphia Symposium on the History of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, March 16-17, 2007. Her faculty sponsor is Dr. Sarah K. Rich.

Daniel Haxall

Daniel Haxall, Ph.D. candidate in art history, presented a paper, "'This tragedy still continues': Esteban Vicente, Robert Motherwell, and the Spanish Civil War," at the 22nd Annual Graduate Art History Student Symposium at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, March 2-3, 2007.

Gretta Tritch

Gretta Tritch, M.A. candidate in art history, presented a paper, "Master of Detail: Archiving the Work of Fay Jones," at the Architecture and Landscapes of Arkansas: A Heritage of Distinction conference at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, March 2, 2007.

Ilenia Colon Mendoza

Ilenia Colón Mendoza, Ph.D. candidate in art history, presented a paper, "The Iconography of Cristo Yacente in Baroque Spain," at the annual conference of the College Art Association, New York City, February 14-18, 2007.

Daniel Haxall

Daniel Haxall, Ph.D. candidate in art history, has been awarded a Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He will be in residency at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, from January 1 to March 31, 2007. Mr. Haxall is completing work on his dissertation, "Politics, Form, and Identity in Abstract Expressionist Collage." His advisor is Professor Sarah K. Rich.

Carmen L. McCann

Carmen L. McCann, Ph.D. candidate in art history, presented a paper, "Eugène Delacroix's Heroic Figures and the 'Status Viatoris," at the conference Constructions of Death, Memory, and Mourning, held at Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, October 26-29, 2006.

Alissa Walls Mazow

Alissa Walls Mazow, Ph.D. candidate in art history, presented a paper, "Datura, Psilocybin and Opium Poppies: Psychotropics in the Art of Fred Tomaselli and Roxy Paine," at the meeting of the Southeastern College Art Association and the Mid-America College Art Association, held at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, October 25-23, 2006.

Sarah Lippert January 18, 2007

Sarah Lippert, Ph.D. candidate in art history, has been awarded a Waddell Biggart Graduate Fellowship to assist with her dissertation research on "Theory, Practice, and Competition in the Visual Arts: The Fortunes of the Paragone in French and British Nineteenth-Century Art." Her advisor is Professor Brian Curran.

Janalee Emmer January 18, 2007

Janalee Emmer, Ph.D. candidate in art history, has been awarded a Waddell Biggart Graduate Fellowship to assist with her dissertation research on "Reflections of the Self: Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France." Her advisor is Professor Nancy Locke.

Janalee Emmer

Janalee Emmer, Ph.D. candidate in art history, has been awarded a Getty Graduate Internship in the Department of Exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, for 2006-07. Jana is writing her dissertation on "Reflections of the Self: Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France." Her advisor is Dr. Nancy Locke.

Sarah J. Lippert

Sarah J. Lippert, Ph.D. candidate in art history, has been awarded a $7000 Travel Fellowship from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for 2006-07. This will enable her to complete her dissertation on "Theory, Practice, and Competition in the Visual Arts: The Fortunes of Paragone in French and British 19th-Century Art." Her advisor is Dr. Brian A. Curran.

Last Updated: Thursday, May 15, 2008