Working on a humanities research project has proved to be challenging in ways I had not expected. Choosing a topic to study was simple with the guidance of my project advisor. I have pursued learning about the life and work of Maria Sibylla Merian. Merian was an entomologist and artist from the late 1600s. She made tremendous strides for the understanding of insects, ecosystems, and metamorphosis at the time when most believed in spontaneous generation.

Contemporaneity asks what it means to be contemporary. The term is often invoked in reference to the current lives of citizens of today’s world, but this edition seeks to highlight contemporaneity across a wider variety of historical contexts. The aim is to uncover how cultures throughout the global past have negotiated temporalities, modernities, and historicisms, to come to terms with what it means to be present in their own moment. 

Author: Rae Di Cicco

PhD Student in History of Art and Architecture

Adding to the department’s many collaborations with local cultural institutions, I have been working with Stephen J. Tonsor, Director of Science and Research at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Stewart Urist, Managing Director at Quantum Theatre, to connect programming at the theater on Troy Hill to local collections.

Author: Emi Finkelstein

PhD Student in History of Art and Architecture