Achievements from Students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
View our latest newsletter and read more about Faculty, Student, and Alumni Achievements from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Archaeology
Katie Breyer presented the paper "Socio-Cultural Identity in the Tower Tombs of Palmyra" at the Crossing Over: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Death conference at Bryn Mawr.
Tracey Cian presented her paper "The Middle and Late Bronze Age ‘Royal Tombs’ of Byblos: local and international interactions of the deceased as seen in the grave goods" at the the Crossing Over: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Death conference at Bryn Mawr. Tracey will travel to Lebanon from June-July as part of the Lebanon-Kubba Coastal Survey directed by Archaeology Professor Jennie Bradbury.
Shannon Dunn will travel to Lebanon from June-July as part of the Lebanon-Kubba Coastal Survey directed by Archaeology Professor Jennie Bradbury. This Fall Shannon will join the American School of Classical Studies in Athens as a regular member.
Matthew Jameson traveled to the Peabody Museum at Harvard University to study Parthian pottery from the Iranian site Tepe Yahya.
Yusi Liu presented the paper "Examining Death Through a Comparative Analysis of Pictorial Representations in Proto-Attic Greek and East Zhou Chinese Vessels" at the Crossing Over: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Death conference at Bryn Mawr. This summer Yusi will attend the summer session the American School in Athens. She will then work in the collections of the Athenian Agora Excavations of the American School in Athens.
Ashley Mason continued as a regular member at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
Clare Rasmussen will join the excavations at Gordion in Turkey to work in the museum as a finds registrar.
Andrea Samz-Pustol is spending this academic year as an Associate Member at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. This Spring she participated in the excavations at Corinth. This summer Andrea will return to the ongoing excavations at Morgantina in Sicily.
Zach Silvia published the co-authored paper “Bashtepa 2016: Preliminary Report of the First Season of Excavations” in Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan, volume 48. He is also a 2018-19 recipient of the Bryn Mawr McPherson Award for Excellence for outstanding community service. This May, Zach gave the talk “Mind the Gap: Rural Hellenistic Central Asia from the Ground Up” as part of the Graduate Group in Archaeology, Classics and History of Art Spring 2019 celebration. This summer he will attend the Bryn Mawr College Russian Language Institute immersion course.
Andrew Tharler defended his doctoral dissertation titled “The Terracotta Altars of Morgantina”. Andrew will be the GSAS student speaker at Bryn Mawr’s Spring Convocation celebration. This fall, Andrew will begin a Lecturing Fellowship with the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University.
Chemistry
Mary Sexton was awarded a Bryn Mawr College McPherson Award for Excellence for 2019-20 for outstanding community service.
Haley Varnum and Cassie Gates will present the co-authored poster “Protonation-induced redox reactivity in synthetic models of the mononuclear molybdenum cofactor" at the Molybdenum and Tungsten Enzyme Conference in Potsdam, Germany in July.
Samantha Klein defended her doctoral dissertation “"A Break In Communication: The Synthesis, Characterization, DNA Binding and Photocleavage of a Novel Ruthenium Polypyridyl Complex Containing an Electronically Isolated Pyrene Group".
Haley Varnum (A.B./M.A. ‘19 ) has accepted a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the University of Potsdam in Germany.
Classics
Graduate students in the Department of Greek, Latin and Classical Studies hosted Richard Martin for this year’s Agnes Michels Lecture, organized by Danielle Perry and Kristen Peterson.
Daniel Crosby will travel in August to the XVIII International Conference on Patristic Studies at the University of Oxford to give the paper “The ‘New Song’ of Eunomos: Dragons and Materiality in the Protrepticus of Clement of Alexandria”.
Stella Fritzell gave the talk "Lamentation as Performance in Ancient Greece and Pre-Qin China" at the Crossing Over: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Death conference at Bryn Mawr.
Jenni Glaser is the organizer of the Septentrionale Americanum Latinitatis Vivae Institutum program Biduum Graecum at Claymont Court Mansion in Claymont, West Virginia. The program is an intensive weekend-long living language Ancient Greek immersion course. This May Jenni gave the talk "Tragic Tears and Raucous Laughter: Lucian’s Theater of Life in the Underworld" at the Crossing Over: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Death conference at Bryn Mawr. Jenni will also give the paper “Dum fit Miser: Sorrow and Fear in Seneca’s Thysetes” at the Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies at St. Louis University in June. In July she will teach Greek at the Polis Institute in Rome.
Collin Hilton continued his fellowship at the American Institute in Rome. Collin also published “Epicurean Myth Rationalization in Plutarch’s De latenter vivendo and Lucretius’ Catalogue of Underworld Torments” in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies.
Olivia Hopewell gave the talk “Seeking the Self in the Sentence: Reconsidering Ethical Reception of Autobiography with Two Case Studies from Late Antiquity” as part of the Graduate Group in Archaeology, Classics and History of Art Spring 2019 celebration.
Daniel Perry gave the talk "Slave Death in the Epigrams of Anyte" at the Crossing Over: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Death conference at Bryn Mawr.
Joshua Shaw will teach a course on Intensive Latin for graduate students at Hillsdale College in Michigan.
Christie Villarreal taught Roman History at Lehigh University this Spring semester. This summer Christie will return to archaeological excavations at Cosa, Italy for the fourth year, a project directed by Professor Darby Scott. Christie is also researching epigraphy from Cosa.
History of Art
Mengtian Bai gave the talk "The Heavenly Kiss in the Earthbound Space: a preliminary study on the Pengshan M550 tomb" at the Crossing Over: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Death conference at Bryn Mawr.
Nina Blomfield will spend this summer preparing for an exhibition of Bryn Mawr College’s collection of Lockwood de Forest furniture, supported by a Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Library Graduate Internship.
Kat Ford presented the talk “Queer Corporeality: Metamorphic Grottoes in the Boboli Gardens,” as part of the Graduate Group in Archaeology, Classics and History of Art Spring 2019 celebration.
Justinne Lake-Jedzinak continued her research residency at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, supported by the Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities.
Michelle Smiley continued her term as a Wyeth Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Shannon Steiner has accepted the Hanns Swarzenski and Brigitte Horney Swarzenski Fellowship in Art History for research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Nava Streiter has accepted a Getty Curatorial Internship in the Manuscripts Department at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for 2019-20.
Kaylee Verkruisen gave the talk "Damsels and Demons: Iconographic Continuities in Byzantine Apotropaic Amulets" at the Crossing Over conference.
Arielle Winnik will continue her Kress Foundation Institutional Fellowship.
Mechella Yezernitskaya was awarded a dissertation grant from the Malevich Society.
Mathematics
This March Isaac Craig, Elsa Magness, Danielle Smiley, and A.J. Vargas attended the Spring Meeting of the Mathematical Association of America, Eastern Section at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre. Isaac Craig presented the paper "Knot Traces and Sliceness".
Lindsay Dever attended the “Automorphic Forms Workshop” at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.
Hannah Schwartz successfully defended her doctoral dissertation “Exotic Phenomena in Dimension Four”. Hannah also published the co-authored paper “Isotopy of surfaces in 4-manifolds after a single stabilization” in Advances in Mathematics, 341.
Danielle Smiley successfully defended her doctoral dissertation "Estimates on Oscillatory Singular Integral Operators." She continued as Full Time Instructor in Mathematics at Villanova University.
Daniel White gave the talk “Twelfth Power Moment of Dirichlet L-functions” at the City University of New York Study Group in Number Theory lecture series.
Physics
Andy Clark traveled to The Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to perform an experiment with X-PEEM in May. In April, Andy participated in the Science in Clark Park public outreach event, teaching attendees about Magnetism and MechanoBiology.
Olivia McAuley will travel to the International School of Space Science (ISSS) in L’Aquila, Italy to join a workshop with the Gaia Survey, a project dedicated to producing a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way Galaxy. In June, Olivia will attend the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Dynamical Astronomy Conference in Boulder, CO.
Xiao Wang traveled to The Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to perform an experiment with X-PEEM in May.