History of Art and Architecture Newsletter – May 2025

Dear Friends,

As chair of the Department of the History of Art & Architecture (HAA), I am writing to tell you about the department’s many successes during a demanding year. Our students, alumni, staff, and faculty are achieving great things.

HAA has received national recognition. We recently learned that the department is ranked 18th out of 140 art history departments in the US, according to Academic Analytics, the software system used by UMass to benchmark its research. We are the highest-ranking MA-only program in the country. In terms of research productivity, HAA is therefore competitive with colleges and universities with far greater resources. We do more with less!

Confirming HAA’s strengths, an outside review of the department found it equally strong in teaching and service. Required by UMass, the AQAD (Academic Quality Assessment & Development review) was a two-day inspection by a visiting committee of respected art historians from other schools. They reported that the teaching, research, and service of the faculty and staff were all excellent. The department conducted an extensive self-study in preparation for the AQAD review which will guide HAA’s future plans.

This edition of the HAA newsletter elaborates upon the department’s notable achievements. Here are a few of the highlights:

• The faculty have received two Fulbrights! A major achievement for this department of eleven professors was receiving two prestigious Fulbright awards this spring. The Fulbright awards fellowships to scholars for research and teaching abroad. For the academic year ’25/’26, Christine Ho will undertake research in Taiwan and Margaret Vickery will do research in Denmark.
• Other HAA faculty also received important awards. The faculty news section of this newsletter will tell you more about how faculty have been active as teachers, scholars and administrators. In other sections, you will find out how long-term, ambitious projects have come to fruition.
• Slavery North opened its doors to its first fellows and commenced an active program of events, including an exhibition about student-written children’s books.
• Faculty and students organized several other exhibitions on campus about art and music, UMass’s architecture, and efforts to prevent birds from colliding with buildings.
• Undergraduates have been busy with many activities, from field trips to internships to winning awards. The Art History Society organized events, including a trip to New Haven where I looked at Yale’s modern architecture with them.
• Graduate students organized another successful Roskill Symposium. They have received department fellowships, prestigious internships, and been admitted to PhD programs.
• Alumni have actively engaged with the department, visited UMass, and generously funded fellowships for students. An alumna, Kristina L. Durocher (’99MA), has become Visual Arts Director of the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst. She tells us about her career trajectory in this newsletter. I also enjoyed meeting with alumni. Sarah Johnson Court (‘03BA) visited the department to talk with students about her career insuring artworks, which has taken her all over the world from London to Miami. The alumni news section can tell you more about the exciting things our alumni are doing.

And there’s lots more to read about here . . .

I want to take this opportunity to thank Olivia White (’25MA) for her skillful editing of this newsletter and Regina Bortone de Sá, HAA’s department administrator, for her help with everything to do with the department.

These are challenging times for UMass and all of us, but the hard work of the department’s faculty, staff, students and support of the alumni are inspirational and offer us fresh hope for the future of art and architectural history at UMass Amherst and beyond it. Alumni donations to HAA are greatly appreciated. They fund internships and enhance our students’ experiences overall. Keep looking and thinking about art and the world the way you learned to at UMass! Please share news about yourself with HAA by writing to me at tmrohan@umass.edu. 

Sincerely,

Timothy M. Rohan
Chair, Department of the History of Art & Architecture
Associate Professor

Gülru Çakmak

Associate Professor | 19th-Century European Art
Gülru's Faculty Page

Gülru Çakmak remained active in research, teaching, and academic leadership. In her role as Chief Editor of H-France Salon, she spearheaded a range of webinars and digital publications, advancing the journal’s interdisciplinary reach. She participated at HERS Leadership Institute as a Fellow, and was selected an Office of Faculty Development Scholar. In addition to submitting two articles and a book review for publication, she worked on her two book manuscripts, while also studying the Ottoman language. Çakmak continued her public scholarship on Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi by delivering a public lecture at the Kennedy Center, and a talk in the Opera Lafayette’s online seminar series as well as recording a video interview for Faculti.net. She organized a panel at the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference, and presented her work on Hamdi’s modernity. She oversaw the peer review and revision process for twelve articles in her forthcoming volume, Nineteenth-Century Visual Technologies in Contemporary Practices.

Çakmak offered a new graduate seminar, Ecocritical Perspectives on the Art and Visual Culture of the Long Nineteenth Century, and mentored two graduate students on publishable paper projects. She served as the coordinating faculty for the department’s signature large-enrollment survey course, History of Art: Renaissance to Present, expanding it with additional online sections and bringing the total enrollment to over 270 students. Looking ahead, she has been awarded the 2025–2026 Chancellor’s Leadership Fellowship in order to establish the Humanities At Work Program at the Mount Ida Campus, aimed at connecting humanities students with diverse professional career opportunities.

Walter B. Denny

Distinguished Professor Emeritus | Islamic Art, Museum Studies, Orientalism
Emeritus Faculty as of fall 2023
Walter's Faculty Page

Walter Denny's 2024-25 second academic year of retirement included lectures in İstanbul (keynote, International Conference on Oriental Carpets, June 7 2024), via Zoom for New England Rug Society (September 7), Washington DC (workshop on museum curation at The Textile Museum, October 21-24), Boston (workshop on carpets at the Museum of Fine Arts, November 13), Cambridge (lecture and workshop on Islamic carpets at Harvard Art Museums, November 14), New York (Hajji Baba Club, December 3), Amherst (UM/A Retired Faculty Association, February 12, 2025), London (University of London, March 12), Oxford (Ashmolean Museum, March 14), London (Courtauld Institute workshop, March 17), Hartford (Wadsworth Atheneum, March 20), and Washington DC (The Textile Museum's 100th anniversary celebration, April 5). 

Walter continued to chair the Visiting Committee of the Department of Textile Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his consulting work included Paris (Musée du Louvre, March 10, 2025), Toronto (Art Gallery of Ontario, August 19-20, 2024), and the United Arab Emirates (via Internet, July through September 2024).  Two doctoral advisees, at Columbia and the Courtauld, received their Ph.D. degrees this academic year, and Walter has joined or continues to serve on PhD and MA graduate committees at several other US universities.

Sonja Drimmer

Associate Professor | Medieval Art
Sonja's Faculty Page

Sonja Drimmer had an exciting year in the department, returning to teach the introductory Gen Ed course Art History 115 (Visual Art, Artists, Cultures) for the first time in over a decade, as well as Art History 308/608, The Art of the Medieval Book. This year's iteration of the class centers on a mass book that was recently acquired by Special Collections and University Archives at the Du Bois Library. Signed by its scribe Gerald Lombard upon its completion in Lyon in 1401, and commissioned by a magistrate for donation to a local church, the book is a rich and virtually unstudied artifact for students to research.

Among the presentations and invited lectures Drimmer gave, she was especially honored to present this year's Peter H. Brieger Memorial Lecture at the University of Toronto, delivering a talk based on a chapter of her book manuscript (which is nearing completion), Impressive Politics: Print before the Press in Late Medieval England. She recently published "Machine Yearning: Generative AI's Structure of Feeling" in the April issue of Artforum and "Queer Transmissions: English Manuscript, Italian Print, and a Discomforting History of the Book," in Renaissance Studies.

Laetitia La Follette

Professor | Ancient Art and Archaeology, Art History and Cybertechnology
Laetitia's Faculty Page

During her 2024 leave, Laetitia La Follette got the chance to visit Sutton Hoo with the excavator, Dr. Martin Carver. She also enjoyed lecturing about the Neolithic megalithic temples, the Knights of St John, and Caravaggio’s short time in the Maltese archipelago for the Archaeological Institute of America’s tour there that also included visiting ancient Greek sites in Sicily like Segesta. (Her daughter Hannah was her plus one on that trip which was great fun!) In the fall, Laetitia and her husband George similarly served as study leaders and lecturers for an archaeological sea voyage from Athens to Rome. In October, Laetitia co-chaired a panel and presented on the department’s DATAS (Digital Assignments for the Training of Art historical Skills) at SECAC, the Southeastern Art Conference in Atlanta. 

In spring 2025, she and her Vexed Antiquities class benefitted from a special tour at the Worcester Art Museum (WAM) where DHAA alum Daniel Healey talked to them about ancient artifacts repatriated to Italy and Turkey, and the new collaboration of the WAM with the Republic of Italy that Daniel helped set up. (In the picture, Daniel is standing in front of Greek vases now on loan from Italy as part of that agreement.)

Ximena Gómez

Assistant Professor | American Art
Ximena's Faculty Page

Ximena Gómez went to Peru in summer 2024, where she procured image permissions for her first book, conducted research for her second, and advanced a new project called “Friend of the Devil,” about a Black art creator in colonial Lima who was tried by the Inquisition. In the fall, she took over as director of Art History 100, learning how to manage a large enrollment class with its army of TAs for the first time. Over the course of the year, she continued with the final stages of her book, In the Hands of Devotees: Indigenous and Black Confraternities and the Creation of Visual Culture in Colonial Lima, which will be published by the University of Texas Press in September 2025. She gave an invited talk at Saint Anselm College, co-organized a roundtable for the College Art Association conference with Derek Burdette, presented at the Renaissance Society of America conference, and participated at a study day at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In the spring semester, she was on parental leave in the spring, having welcomed her second child, Beatriz Gomez-Hart, to her family in January.

Christine I. Ho

Associate Professor | East Asian Art
Christine's Faculty Page

Christine I. Ho taught two new courses: Decorative Arts in fall 2024 and Transpacific Art and Artists in spring 2025.  Students in the decorative arts visited Historic Deerfield to look at textiles and furniture.  For the Transpacific Art and Artists course, students examined works by Asian American artists in the Five Colleges collections, from paintings by Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Mead Art Museum to maps by Tiffany Chung at the Smith Art Museum.  Ho gave several talks and lectures throughout the year, and completed two research articles.  She continued to serve as reviews editor of books on Chinese and Korean art history, and served a third term on the College Personnel Committee.

Karen Kurczynski

Professor and Graduate Program Director | Modern and Contemporary Art
Karen's Faculty Page

Karen Kurczynski returned to full-time teaching with the global Modern Art Gen Ed course and Biology and Art seminar in Fall 2024. Her Contemporary Art course in the Spring involved a major Service Learning project inviting over 200 high school and elementary students from Amherst, Holyoke, and Springfield to conversations about art led by students both in the schools and the University Museum of Contemporary Art. In Spring 2025, the Museum featured the exhibition for which she contributed a major catalog essay, “Is Anything the Matter? The Drawings of Laylah Ali.” She led several walkthroughs of the exhibition and spoke about it at “HFA Days” in March. She also spoke on the opening panel of the Curatorial Fellows exhibition at the UMCA, “Off Balance: Art in the Age of Human Impact.”

Karen continued active research, writing, and editing for her ongoing book project Drawing in Color: Power and Vulnerability in Art of the 1990s, and published an interview with artist Shahzia Sikander in 2024 on Artforum.com. Her article on drawing and anti-Black violence, “Steve Locke's '#Killers': Facing the Inhumanity of Whiteness” appeared in 2025 in the Journal of Visual Culture. As Graduate Program Director she continued to advocate for students and led an excursion to Mass MoCA in January, 2025, where they toured the museum and met with MA alum Rebekah Rennick, acting Registrar, and Evan Garza, Curator of the exhibition “Steve Locke: The Fire Next Time.”

Charmaine A. Nelson

Provost Professor | Black Diasporic Art and Visual Culture
Charmaine's Faculty Page

Charmaine A. Nelson founded Slavery North in 2022 and won a 2.65-million-dollar Mellon grant in 2023. Since then, she has welcomed staff members Emily Davidson and Hope O’Shaughnessy and completed the search for her Associate Director. Slavery North welcomed its inaugural cohort of fellows who present their research projects in ongoing fellows talks. Charmaine also taught her combined undergraduate and graduate course The Visual Culture of Slavery (Spring 2025). Her students created original illustrated children’s books which they turned into an exhibition entitled “Sowing History, Reaping Justice: Writing Children’s Books about Slavery in Canada and the US North” (April 16 – June 6, 2025). The books will be published in June on Charmaine’s award-winning academic and pop culture platform, Black Maple Magazine.

Charmaine also published two edited books The Precariousness of Freedom: Slave Resistance as Experience, Process, and Representation (2024), Creolization and Transatlantic Blackness: The Visual and Material Cultures of Slavery (2025,) and the tenth anniversary issue of her online student journal Chrysalis featuring UMass student articles. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Universities Art Association of Canada in 2024. Charmaine will be a fellow at the John Carter Brown Library and The Clark Institute in 2025-2026.

Nancy Noble

Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, College of Humanities and Fine Arts
Senior Lecturer in American Art
Nancy's Faculty Page

Nancy Noble (’95MA) co-taught “Careers for Art History Majors” with Professor Meg Vickery. Continuing as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education & Student Success in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, she supervised the college’s Writing Program, which offers first-year writing courses to over 5000 students annually and serves all university community members through The Writing Center; directed the college’s undergraduate Advising and Career Center, Student Success Task Force, and New Student Orientation and Transition programs; and coordinated the college’s undergraduate recruiting efforts, including Fall Visit and spring Destination Days. As the chief academic dean for undergraduates in the college’s 29 major programs, she advised students on an individual basis throughout the year. She served on the HFA Curriculum Committee, HFA Supplemental Instructional Allocation (SIA) Committee, Faculty Senate Undergraduate Education Council, the university’s Undergraduate Deans Council, and represented HFA on the Undergraduate Enrollment Management Team. In summer 2024, she served as faculty advisor to History of Art & Architecture major Alejandra Salva-Martorell, who researched two federal era portraits from Connecticut which had never previously been investigated or placed in the art historical context.

Timothy Rohan

Department Chair and Associate Professor | American and European Architecture
Tim's Faculty Page

Tim Rohan was busy during his second year as chair of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. He successfully supervised a UMass required, comprehensive review of the department (the AQAD), which included an on-site visit from an external committee. Tim advanced his own scholarship. He lectured about modernist interiors for a fall 2024 London conference, and he spoke about brutalism for a Boston symposium in spring 2025. The Public Historian invited him to review an exhibition about queer interiors organized by Historic New England. The online journal, Drawing Matter, asked him to write a piece about Paul Rudolph's drawings. 

With his UMassBRUT colleagues, Tim co-organized an exhibition of student work called “Windows on UMass.” It was displayed at the University in fall 2024 and then traveled to UMass Dartmouth in spring 2025. It is one of the first collaborations between UMass campuses of this kind. The Western Massachusetts American Institute of Architects presented Tim with an award for his advocacy of modern architecture in the region. Tim also continued to serve on committees for the Society of Architectural Historians and Historic New England.

Monika Schmitter

Professor | Italian Renaissance and Baroque
Monika's Faculty Page

Monika Schmitter looks forward to the publication of her article “Character in Search of a Play: Parmigianino’s Portrait of a Dignitary” in The Art Bulletin this coming September or December. She will present new research on the color green in Renaissance portraits at this year’s Renaissance Society of America meeting. In the past year, she was invited twice to the Projects Committee meeting of Save Venice, Inc., a charity that funds major art restoration projects in the city.

This Spring semester, Monika was particularly thrilled to teach “Curating Views of Venice."  For this course, 12 undergraduate students organized an exhibition on artists’ depiction of Venice. The exhibition will open in September 2025 at the Smith College Museum of Art. 

Margaret “Meg” Vickery

Lecturer, Undergraduate Program Director | Architecture
Meg's Faculty Page

Once again, Meg Vickery spent some of the Summer of 2024 advising new students for the College of Humanities and Fine Arts. She enjoys introducing these recent high school graduates to the rich course offerings in our College. She taught Nature and the Built Environment course again this year and introduced a visit to the new Learning Lodge built on campus by the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science. Students learned how the visiting scholars and elders chose the saplings for construction and about the contemplative rituals associated with entering this sacred structure. Meg also hosted the ornithologist Daniel Klem of Muhlenberg College. Dan visited her class and then gave a public lecture about the dangers reflective glass windows and walls pose to our bird populations. In March 2025, Meg presented an excerpt of her chapter, “The Business of Childhood: Play and Nature in the work of Marjory Allen” at the international book launch of Women in Scandinavian Landscape Architecture: Building Collaborative and Transnational Feminist Histories published by de Gruyter Press in September 2024.

Meg has hosted several events for our undergrads including welcome back pizza parties, our annual Success Stories: Life After the Major with alumnae guests, Tiana Burnett, Ned Lazaro, and Henriette Ket Der Vries. Meg worked with undergrads Arlo Kellie, Owen Embury, Camille Gomez, Pricilla Mota, and Nic Restrepo to curate “Music of the Valley” an exhibition about the music scene in the Pioneer Valley. Bill Kaizen gave a terrific talk on the subject as part of the opening. Meg also initiated an art competition to design adhesive film for the north walls of the Studio Arts building on campus. This will be installed in April 25 according to the designs of Margaret Lepeshkin, a Studio Arts major.

This year's keynote speaker was Dr. Romita Ray of Syracuse University, who presented a paper titled "'Joyous Howling': Jungli Fragments and Tea Plantations."

Born and brought up in the bustling Indian city of Calcutta (now Kolkata), once the colonial capital of the British Raj, Romita Ray specializes in the art and architecture of the British Empire in India. At Syracuse University, she teaches European art and architecture (18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries), Indian art and architecture, post-colonial theory, theories of Orientalism, and film studies. Dr. Ray has also taught at Colby College, the University of Georgia, and Yonsei University (Seoul, Korea). Her research interests center on the art and architecture of the British empire in India, history of science, landscape and animal studies, the Anthropocene, post-colonial theory, Orientalism in art, and material culture. Dr. Ray is an editorial board member for the Journal of South Asian Studies and a member of the Advisory Committee for the Indian Council of Historical Research based in New Delhi, India. She also serves as Executive Board Member at Large (2021-2024) for the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS), and is a member of the Advisory Committee for the Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University (2021-2022). Dr. Ray is particularly partial to elephants, and an Elephant of the Month posting can be found on her office door in Bowne Hall (contributions to the EOM series are welcome). (Syracuse University)

I was born and raised in Kamwokya, Uganda. I hold an undergraduate degree in Criminology and a Master of Architecture (M.Arch) from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. My academic and research interests center on Islamic art and architecture along the East African coast, with particular attention to how Swahili artistic and architectural forms have shaped these traditions. While studying architecture, I was deeply motivated to explore African architectural heritage and understand how indigenous design principles may have influenced the societies that engage with African art and architecture. Despite encountering a lack of scholarly resources on the subject, this gap only reinforced my commitment to pursuing this line of research.

My current project investigates the architectural intersections between East African coastal design and Islamic traditions, specifically focusing on Lamu Island in present-day Kenya. I am particularly interested in how Islamic architectural styles have been influenced by African aesthetics and spatial practices. I am grateful to Professor Margaret Vickery for her generous guidance and support throughout this process. Her thoughtful feedback and access to relevant materials have created an intellectually rich environment for my work.

This summer, I will travel to Oman for an immersive language program and architectural tour. I am thankful for the fellowship that has made this opportunity possible, allowing me to further explore the cultural and architectural exchanges between East Africa and the wider Islamic world.

Thank you,

Emmanuel

Each summer, graduate students receive funding from the department and the Graduate School to assist with their professional development. Students may, for example, intern at a local museum or enrich their language skills. The class of 2025 provided the following statements about their experiences in the summer of 2024.

Yarra Berger ('25) divided her time between two internships last summer at the Smith College Museum of Art and the Yale Divinity Library. Yarra worked alongside the Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Danielle Carrabino, during a curatorial internship at the Smith College Museum of Art, where she researched and wrote the exhibition label and an accompanying museum article for Self-Portrait (Myself at Work) by Archibald Motley Jr. During an archival internship with the Yale Divinity Library, Yarra also processed and wrote the guide for the Jay and Marjory Kapenga Papers. 
 
Upon graduation, Yarra will attend a PhD program in Art History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she will study the History of Photography with Dr. Andrés Mario Zervignón. 

With Summer Development Funding I was able to both gain new language skills and develop my specific research goals.

To begin the summer, these funds enabled me to enroll in an intensive course in French for reading knowledge through Yale University. Continuing a learning process that I began at UMass by auditing an introductory French course, this time was especially helpful in tailoring my language learning to the needs of academic research. The training has already enabled me to make exciting inroads into some of my existing research interests––namely, learning more about afforestation in the forest of Fontainebleau during the nineteenth century and its impact on painting and early photography. Building on the foundation this course provided, I plan to continue my study of French in the future.

After completing the language course, I also utilized the funding to conduct research visits to the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Yale University, the special collections of the Yale Medical Historical Library, and Harvard’s Houghton Library. The proximity to source material these visits enabled was indispensable to my ongoing research into representations of fish from the early-nineteenth century and exposed me to a range of new sources and crucial connections.

Over the summer, I worked as a Curatorial and Education intern at the University Museum of Contemporary Art. Under the guidance of Associate Director Amanda Herman, I developed materials for several projects and exhibitions to take place in the coming academic year.

My first project involved researching artists for the Fall 2024 Collecting 101 undergraduate class at the UMCA. I compiled a list of over fifteen Native and Indigenous contemporary artists whose work was underrepresented in the UMCA’s collections. For each artist, I drafted a brief biography of their career and identified works on paper which the Collecting 101 class could purchase at the annual Vote for Art event. I also assisted with researching four artists whose work would be included in the upcoming Spring 2025 new acquisitions exhibition, and drafted labels for each of their selected artworks.

I also created a teacher and educator’s guide for Courtney M. Leonard’s exhibition BREACH: LOGBOOK 24 | STACCATO. For this project, I worked with Education and Engagement Director Elizabeth Gittens to draft a twenty-page education guide that would be used for student groups visiting the exhibition in the fall. During my time as a summer intern, I was able to work alongside multiple departments in the Fine Arts Center, and I gained valuable experience with curatorial preparation, planning, and teaching. I am grateful for the support of the Professional Development fund, and will continue to build upon these experiences in the next stage of my career.

Yuqing Tao ('25) spent this past summer conducting several archaeological field surveys to some of the late cave temples and cliff sculptures in Fujian and Anhui Provinces, China, and also writing a research paper and report on the trip. His work, "Archaeological survey of a newly discovered Manichean cliff carving, Feilu Pagoda, Chi'ao Grotto and cliff alcove in Ningde, Fujian Province," describes his findings by introducing one of the earliest Manichean sites discovered in southeastern coastal China and expanding the geographic northwestern boundary of such sites. The article is forthcoming in the journal: Cave Temples Studies (vol. 19).

After his graduation from UMass Amherst, he will attend the History of Art and Architecture PhD program at the University of Pittsburgh. He will be studying cave temples with Professor Michelle McCoy.

I began my summer with a whirlwind 72 hours in Dublin, Ireland, where I viewed the oil painting A Black Woman (French school, 19th century), the subject of my research project, at the Hugh Lane Gallery. While there, I met with curators, read object files, and visited three additional archives. This experience was essential to the aims of my project and could not have happened without the generous support of the graduate student summer funding.

The rest of my summer consisted of studying for the upcoming image exam, more research, and interning at the Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA), with the Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Danielle Carrabino. I explored SCMA’s collection of French art, including an eighteenth-century portrait of a woman attributed to Adélaïde Labille-
Guiard and an oil study for Eugène Delacroix's Scène des massacres de Scio. I ultimately focused on a Rococo sculptural pair by Claude Michel (Clodion), currently on view on the second floor. I wrote interpretative labels to accompany the sculptures—Nymph with Two Children and Satyr with Two Children—as well as a short essay that suggests a date range for the sculptures (c. 1770–1800). This essay will be available now on the SCMA's blog.

This year, the department welcomed six students into the cohort of 2026: Georgia Brabec, Gengwei Guo,​ Emmanuel Nkuranga, Marcela Pareja-Araujo, Caelen Trujillo, and Yunyue (Sarah) Zhang.

"The Transformative Power of a UMass Amherst Art History Degree"

Museum Leadership and Advancing Art in Higher Education

Twenty-five years after completing Professor Walter Denny’s Museum Studies course, I never anticipated I would return to UMass in a professional capacity, much less, as the inaugural Director of Visual Arts, overseeing the University Museum of Contemporary Art and Hampden and Augusta Savage Galleries. That I built, and have sustained, a career in the museum field, contributing to the study and presentation of visual arts, is due to the robust and rigorous foundation in Art History I received as a student. My trajectory—from graduate student to curatorial assistant to museum director and leader in the field—exemplifies the transformative power of a University of Massachusetts Amherst Art History degree.

Art and Technology

One of the strengths of the Art History program is the broad and varied scholarship of the faculty who introduce students to current research and methodologies. Professor Laetitia La Follette’s work in the digital humanities introduced my cohort of students to the nascent digital humanities field. Because of this digital proficiency, my career started managing National Endowment for the Humanities and Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant-funded digitization projects.

Small Museums

IMLS estimates there are 35,000 museums in the country; in New England, we are fortunate to be home to some of the oldest collections with many museums housing art, historic objects, and natural science artifacts. My background as a generalist has served me well working with the diverse and eclectic collections of regional independent and academic museums. Working for smaller institutions provides exciting opportunities: the ability to take on new and expanded responsibilities across departments and connect directly with patrons. Small museums have their own challenges, but being part of a small dynamic team of professionals is immensely rewarding.

Diverse Exhibitions

After working briefly for two historic museums, I joined the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts as an assistant curator before becoming curator of collections managing a small collection of European, American, and Asian art, and overseeing the growth of the museum’s African and photography collections. One of my lasting curatorial contributions was the creation of a hands-on educational exhibition of Egyptian art and early 20th Century Egyptian Revival paintings that remains on view to this day. My experience at the Fitchburg Art Museum with its focus on K-12 audiences, expanded my knowledge in both the theory and practice of museum education. This, in turn, led to my position directing the Museum of Art of the University of New Hampshire from 2011-2023. Over the course of twelve years, I curated more than seventy exhibitions and grew the collection by about six hundred works of art. As a teaching museum, I focused on curricular and co-curricular activities, and created contemporary art exhibitions, partnering with artists whose work addressed critical social and cultural issues. Occasionally, I paired artists with academics, for example, one exhibition embedded an artist on an Atlantic Ocean research vessel, creating an artist’s residency at sea. Another project involved students from the Classics, Humanities, and Italian Department who wrote labels and catalogue entries for an exhibition of late 20th century paintings of Greek mythological scenes as told from the female protagonists' points of view. The project was so successful that the collaborative exhibition will be featured in an upcoming anthology, Teaching about the Ancient World in Museums.

Field-wide Service

While at the Fitchburg Art Museum I became involved in regional and national professional museum associations, first as a member of the New England Museum Association eventually serving as vice-president on the Board of Directors. Through this association, I became more invested in issues affecting the broader field which led to my co-editing a book, For Love or Money: The State of Museum Salaries, 2019. Soon after joining the University of New Hampshire, I became involved with the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG), the premier organization for which I now serve as president. As president of AAMG, I have guided the implementation of the organization’s strategic plan, grown membership and revenue, created student-centric programming, and focused on professional development opportunities for individuals and initiatives that contribute to the health of our member institutions.

UMass Amherst

My Art History degree is the foundation of my museum career. It opened doors by providing me with the analytical skills, historical knowledge, and curatorial expertise necessary to navigate the evolving landscape of museums and higher education. Throughout my career, and at UMass Amherst, my work with visual art and contemporary artists exemplifies the transformative potential of an Art History degree, demonstrating that the arts remain a vital force in education, public engagement, and cultural enrichment.

Yi-Lin Cheng ’23MA (she/her)

Yi-Lin is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota. She recently presented her paper, "Violence and Cuteness: A Case Study of William Morris’s and Walter Crane’s Political Cartoon" in the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (NCSA) conference. She also presented "Alluring Labor: Aestheticized Labor and Time Manipulation in Process Film" in the Cleveland Symposium and won the third place in their Graduate Student Paper Competition. Yi-Lin is also excited to share that she was rewarded the Roe fellowship and will embark on a research trip in London this upcoming summer.

Maura Coughlin ’90BA (she/her)

Maura Coughlin (BA Art History & English, UMass, 1990 / MA Tufts 1994 / PhD NYU 2001) is Teaching Professor of Art History at Northeastern University (Boston). She has published on subjects such as agriculture and wastelands in Brittany, trans-Atlantic fishing communities, coastal ecologies and resource extraction. Her research focuses on ecocritical studies of nineteenth-century French visual culture. She is co-editor of Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture (2020) and her work is included in Picture Ecology, Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective (2021). In 2023, she was co-curator of the exhibition “A singularly marine & fabulous produce: the Cultures of seaweed” at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. She has essays forthcoming in 2025 in the collections Methods for Ecocritical Art History; The Routledge Companion to Irish Art; Animal Modernities: Images, Objects, Histories, 1750-1900 and a series of “Commentaries” co-edited with Emily Gephart in American Art (Smithsonian). 

We are grateful for the generosity of our many alumni and friends. Your gifts to the Department of the History of Art & Architecture support annual events like our guest lecture series, the Mark Roskill Symposium, and commencement prizes for graduating seniors. Gifts to the Anne Mochon Internship and the Walter Denny Fund provide our students with grants that support them in summer internships and help them gain the interactive experience so critical to their professional development. They also contribute to our ability to fund the Diversity Fellowship that promises to make a lasting, positive impact on the field of art and architecture history. You know what your art history education means to you. Please help us continue to assist students by making a gift on our website: umass.edu/arthistory/history-art-and-architecture.

For gift inquiries, please contact:

Robby O’Sullivan
Executive Director of Development
College of Humanities & Fine Arts and the Fine Arts Center
UMass Amherst Foundation
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Iris Cheney Fund

In 2024, UMass graduate William McCrea (’75BA) established a new undergraduate fund in memory of Professor Iris Cheney. An excerpt of McCrea's remarks from the May 2024 Newsletter is copied below. The Department of the History of Art & Architecture welcomes donations to the Iris Cheney Fund. Donate now »

Walter Denny Fund

Gifts to the Walter Denny Fund honor his remarkable decades of teaching and scholarship at UMass Amherst and support the education, research opportunities, and professional development of graduate students in the Department of the History of Art & Architecture. The department welcomes donations to the Walter Denny Fund. Donate now »

Visit our Acknowledgements page for Professor Walter Denny to share how he impacted your education and to sign a petition to continue his teaching legacy here at UMass Amherst.

Anne Mochon Internship Fund

Gifts to the Anne Mochon Internship Fund provide our graduate students with grants that help support them in unpaid or poorly paid internships so they can gain the interactive experience so critical to their professional development. The Department of the History of Art & Architecture welcomes donations to the Anne Mochon Internship Fund. Donate now »

We wish to thank the following individuals for their generous donations to our various funds from May 2024–March 2025, including to the Bird-Safe Windows decal installation at the UMass Studio Arts Building: