travel grants

NCHA has awarded travel fellow­ships to attend the 36th CIHA World Congress in Lyon, France, June 23 – 28, 2024 to the following graduate students.

Harleen Kaur Bagga is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Her disser­ta­tion, ​“Possessing Souls/​Sizing Bodies: Gaudenzio Ferrari and the Immersive Magic of the Italian Renaissance,” presents a history of immersion by examining the scale of the life-size. She holds two MAs from Syracuse University in Florence and University College London, and a BA from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. Also inter­ested in cross-cultural encoun­ters between Europe and Asia, she has recently served as a Research Editor for online courses on Indian Art History at the MAP Academy.

Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen is complet­ing her disser­ta­tion, ​“Untitled: Abstraction, India, and Art History’s Time,” at the Department of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University and is currently the Andrew W. Mellon predoc­toral fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (the Center). 

Danelle Bernten is a doctoral student at Florida State University’s Art History Department. Her focus areas are African-American art, Southern and folk art, and Art of the African diaspora. She is the 2024 winner of the FSU Gunther Stamm prize, MLK Book Award, and Helen J. Beard Travel Grant. She is a graduate of Princeton and Louisiana State. 

Ash Duhrkoop, PhD candidate at the University of Virginia, special­izes in Twentieth-century and African art, with an interest in ecocrit­i­cism. Her disser­ta­tion examines the history of art and mineral extrac­tion in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo. She holds an MA in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University and is a Mellon-ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow for the 2023 – 24 academic year. 

Emily Duvall is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, focusing on sixteenth-century French art, advised by Dr. Tania String. Her disser­ta­tion examines visual repre­sen­ta­tions of space as expres­sions of power during the reign of Francis I (1515−1547). In her project, she considers how the spatial construc­tion of the king’s royal imagery exhibited his authority and commu­ni­cated possession.

Virginia Girard is a PhD candidate in the depart­ment of Art History & Archaeology at Columbia University. Her disser­ta­tion recovers myths and folklore asso­ci­ated with the envi­ron­ment of late medieval Flanders to consider their influence on the devel­op­ment of the landscape genre. Virginia completed her MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art and her BA at Cornell University. 

Dana Hogan has developed research related to her disser­ta­tion, ​“Expanding Worlds: Italian Women Artists and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Early Modernity” through Duke University’s depart­ment of Art, Art History & Visual Studies and graduate program in Feminist Studies. Prior to her doctoral studies she earned degrees in Italian Renaissance Art through Syracuse University in Florence, and in Art History and Comparative Literature from Williams College. At Duke, Dana has contributed to several digital human­i­ties initia­tives including the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab and Project Vox, an open-access educa­tional resource on women philosophers.

Vu Horwitz’s research focuses on Central African wooden material culture from the 19th century and earlier. Situating objects within mate­ri­al­ist and ecolog­i­cal frame­works, she concen­trates upon the ways in which artisanal practices in that context expressed various kinds of inter­re­la­tions. She is partic­u­larly inter­ested in inter­pret­ing objects as vital sources for histor­i­cal knowledge, which has led her to explore both the physical and meta­phys­i­cal prop­er­ties of specific materials, as well as the tools and methods of fabri­ca­tion they require. Her disser­ta­tion project draws from and inte­grates a range of disci­plines, including art history, anthro­pol­ogy, dendrol­ogy, and ecology, to reveal the entan­gle­ments that palm wine drinking vessels from the Kuba cultural region embody. 

Tara Kraft-Ainsworth is a doctoral student studying art history at the University of Georgia. Her research explores how Surrealist artists in interwar France, and Europe more broadly, grappled with the quick read­abil­ity of mass-produced liter­a­ture and visual culture. She is partic­u­larly inter­ested in how regional versions of the detective genre — from the French crime novel to the British murder mystery to American hard­boiled fiction — were trans­lated to visual art and why artists saw the detective genre’s formulaic system as an apt conduit to debate modern modes of obser­va­tion and attention. 

Jennifer Laffick is an art history PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University special­iz­ing in eigh­teenth and nine­teenth-century French art, partic­u­larly its rela­tion­ship with empire within the Atlantic world. She is also inter­ested in museology, both the history of museums from the 1700s onward and cura­to­r­ial practice today, and has held positions at a range of insti­tu­tions including the National Gallery of Art, the Norton Museum of Art, and the Wallace Collection. Laffick is a recipient of a Fulbright research grant and will conduct disser­ta­tion research in France at the Université Grenoble Alpes during the 2024 – 25 academic year.

Weronika Malek-Lubawski is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Southern California, working on her disser­ta­tion ​“Between Moscow and Paris: Łódź and the Transnational Avant-Garde Scene.” She spent the 2023 – 24 academic year as a Fulbright Fellow in Poland, where she researched Katarzyna Kobro’s, Władysław Strzemiński’s, and Henryk Berlewi’s careers and inter­na­tional networks. She completed her BFA in Painting and Art history at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, and her MA in Humanities at the University of Chicago.

Bianca Morán (she/​her) is a PhD student in the Art History Department at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She special­izes in Modern and Contemporary Art of the Americas and is pursuing a certifi­cate in Africana Studies. A former K‑16 educator in Los Angeles, her work is deeply informed by her training in cultur­ally relevant and respon­sive pedagogy. Her research interests include political theory, critical race theory, foodways, diaspora, the visual and material culture of the Atlantic world, race and colo­nial­ism, museum pedagogy, and film. Bianca holds an MA in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere from the University of Southern California, an MEd in Education from UCLA, and a BA in Political Science with a minor in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. Bianca is also a single mother raising her daughter, Paloma.

Sun Yang Park is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Her disser­ta­tion focuses on Sinsasilpa, the Korean New Realism Group, and its intricate rela­tion­ship with modernity. As a researcher and aspiring scholar special­iz­ing in modern and contem­po­rary art, her research interests encompass postwar Korean art movements and practices within a global context, political and social perspec­tives, inter­dis­ci­pli­nary studies between modern and contem­po­rary art and liter­a­ture, contem­po­rary art and mate­ri­al­ity, Nam June Paik and multi­me­dia art, and contem­po­rary Korean women artists and art of the diaspora. She has contributed to publi­ca­tions, including journals such as Art History Forum and Art Critique of Taiwan, as well as the edited volume Music, Poetry, and Language: Sound, Sight, and Speech in Comparative and Creative Connection.

April Riddle is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art at The Ohio State University. She holds a BA in the History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an MA in the Rhetorics of Art, Space, and Culture from Southern Methodist University. Her disser­ta­tion explores artist-produced games that take place both on and off screen and the entangled histories of video games and financialization.

Stephanie Strother is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. Her disser­ta­tion focuses on the Atelier Martine, a Paris-based deco­ra­tive arts workshop founded in 1911 by leading fashion designer Paul Poiret. Among other projects, she recently co-curated the exhi­bi­tion Four Chicago Artists: Theodore Halkin, Evelyn Statsinger, Barbara Rossi, and Christina Ramberg at the Art Institute of Chicago.