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Elizabeth Beaudoin ‘16MA

I am currently the Curator for two small museums in the greater Denver area: The Broomfield Depot Museum and the Broomfield Veterans Museum. I oversee all aspects regarding the collections and exhibits. From January through April, I helped lead hands-on sessions for museum studies students at the University of Colorado, where they learned about integrated pest management, disaster planning, cataloging objects, accessioning/deaccessioning, and also had group discussions on how to decolonize and modernize small history museums such as ours to reach a broader, more diverse community. I am including a photo from when the local news channel came to our museum to do a special for Women's History month. We started filming at 5:30am and filmed live segments broadcast during the morning news.

Emily Bumgardner ‘18MA

Emily Bumgardner has been working as a Museum Educator in New York City for three years. She currently teaches Gardening and Hands-on Art activities for elementary students at the Old Stone House of Brooklyn, and she recently became an educator at the New-York Historical Society. At N-YHS, she teaches a broad range of curriculum that focuses on New York City’s diverse history to promote cultural understanding and a civic-minded citizenry. Utilizing an inquiry-based teaching method, she enjoys facilitating thought-provoking discussions with K-12 students by examining paintings, photography, artifacts, and historical documents. Emily also works with the DiMenna Children's History Museum at N-YHS to organize and co-host Reading Into History, a monthly book club for middle grade readers that dives into American historical fiction. 

In her free time, Emily has taken up Japanese lessons to support her personal research interests: the historical and stylistic influences of contemporary Japanese manga and animation, and the cultural exchange between “Eastern” and “Western” animation from the postwar era to today.

Maura Coughlin ‘90BA

Maura Coughlin (BA Art History, UMass 1990, MA Tufts 1994, PhD NYU, 2001) has been teaching Art History, Visual Culture and Environmental Humanities at Bryant University since 2007 and will begin a new position as Teaching Professor in the Department of Art + Design at Northeastern in Sept. 2022.  From seaweed, salt harvesting and fishing to the Breton culture of death and mourning, her work has been focused on late nineteenth-century art, ecologies and material culture of the Brittany and Normandy coasts. She is co-editor of Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture (2019); she serves on the executive board of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association and she co-chairs an interest group devoted to ecocritical visual culture for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.

Taylor Emmons ‘19MA

In January of 2022, I was promoted to Director of Education at the Spartanburg Art Museum, a contemporary art museum in the Upstate of South Carolina. Since being promoted, I have established an internship program with paid internships opportunities, a professional development series for public school art teachers, a free lecture series on contemporary art, and a guest lecture on Islamic art at Converse College, in addition to managing our Art School which serves over 400 students per year. In my spare time, I can be found renovating my 1920's bungalow and rewarding my puppy, Carter, with numerous pup cups for being the best "good boy"! 

Lesley Herzberg ‘06MA

A quick update about me: I have been the Executive Director at the Berkshire County Historical Society for three years. We have weathered the pandemic and come out on the other side stronger for it. I am enjoying the challenges of my position, as well as the rewards that come with fundraising, historic preservation, and community partnerships. My husband and I have been living in the Berkshires for 12 years now, and have two wonderful and spirited boys, ages 8 and 11.

Sarah Horowitz ‘14MA 

Sarah Horowitz continues to make progress on her dissertation entitled "Designing Postwar American Performing Arts Centers, 1955-1971" at Boston University. She was the recipient of the 2021-2022 John Coolidge Research Fellowship, which supported research travel to Chicago and Milwaukee to visit archival collections related to one of the case studies for her project, Harry Weese's Milwaukee Center for the Performing Arts. In February 2022, Sarah gave a public lecture hosted by the New England Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians on the preliminary findings of her research. This year, she has also traveled to Houston, TX, and Los Angeles to research other performing arts venues discussed in her dissertation—and to visit other important postwar buildings that inform her teaching. Sarah is looking forward to more planned archival and site visits in Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC. She received a 2022-2023 Short-Term Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, which will support study of materials tracing the architectural and urban development of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Sarah was thrilled to rejoin the UMass History of Art and Architecture department last summer to teach (online) AH 118 Introduction to the History of Architecture and the Built Environment and looks forward to being a visiting lecturer at Wellesley College in spring 2023, where she will teach a survey course on modern architecture.

J Hughes (they/she) ‘22MA

Hello from Canada! I began my English PhD and Book History & Print Culture programs at the University of Toronto last fall, and feel my good fortune keenly. This summer, I am helping the wonderful Dr. Claire Battershill with a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council focused on community-oriented letterpress printing and programming at the Uxbridge Historical Centre. On the horizon are more hands-on community-engagement projects, my special fields exams, and further development of my dissertation ideas. Though I've 'switched back' to an English department after my UMass Art History degree, I'm pleased to report that my interdisciplinary interests are aided and abetted here--I linked museum studies with linguistics and William Morris's aesthetics with literature for term projects this spring, and am eagerly hatching my artists' book-centered dissertation plans.

Megan McCarthy ‘01BA

I graduated in 2001 with my BA in Art History. Since then I still love to visit museums and create art. I have a 17 year-old daughter, Elizabeth. I obtained my masters in occupational therapy from Bay Path University and my doctorate of occupational therapy from Creighton University. My work has been working with mental health clients and mainly working on acute units providing stabilization and exploring coping tools and grounding techniques. I incorporate art into many of my groups. I wrote and illustrated a children's book about mental illness and reducing stigma of mental illness by normalizing talking about your feelings and understanding that it's okay to feel certain ways. I also created a mural in our sensory room with our art therapy intern and patients who were motivated and willing to engage. It was a great experience and the mural is a colorful and aesthetically pleasing piece of art to look at on our unit. In my spare time I love to read, travel, spend time with friends and family and create art. I currently live in Western Massachusetts with my daughter, Elizabeth, and two adorable cats, August and Dorothea.

Amanda Phillips ‘00MA

Amanda Phillips published her second book, Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles Between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, last spring with the University of California Press. She teaches Islamic Art at the University of Virginia, and she’ll be spending next year as a Fulbright Fellow in Istanbul.