About the Emerging Scholars 2021 Committee

Thomas Busciglio-Ritter is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at the University of Delaware. An international student from France, his research focuses on nineteenth-century American art, especially in a transnational perspective. His dissertation, “The Union of Excellences: An Atlantic History of American Landscape Views, 1790-1860”, examines case studies of artists having constructed U.S. landscapes visually through travel and cross-cultural exchange, developing a transatlantic aesthetic and rejecting national discourses. As part of the Curatorial Track Ph.D. program at UD, Thomas has been involved in exhibition projects at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Nora Ellen Carleson is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of American Civilization at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “From Paul Revere, to Plains Indians, and Peruvian Patterns: The Politics of Progressive Era American Fashion: 1880-1930.” Her work shows how American fashion campaigns of the Progressive Era embraced nativism, nationalism, white supremacy, and eugenic theory to shape politics and culture in the United States. Carleson’s most recent essay, “Lottie Barton, Nineteenth-Century Baltimore’s Premier Modiste and Fashion Smuggler,” can be found in the Maryland Center for History and Culture exhibition catalog Spectrum of Fashion, an exhibition which she also contributed to as an intern in the museum’s fashion archives. 

Michael Hartman is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware and is in the early stages of researching and writing his dissertation, “Art, Technology, and Aesthetics within Landscapes of Enslavement in the Colonial South, 1740-1810.”  Michael has held curatorial internships and fellowships at the Biggs Museum of American Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Winterthur Museum, and the Clark Art Institute, where he curated Extreme Nature!.

Katheryn Lawson is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Delaware, studying the intersections of race, pet keeping, animal care, and animal control in urban America. Digital essays include “Pet Keeping and Pet Hiding in Black America” and “The Little-Known History of Cat Litter.” In past lives, she has studied English, music performance, historical musicology, and library and information science. She is the copy editor for Sloth: A Journal of Emerging Voices in Human-Animal Studies and serves on mental health and mentoring committees across campus.

Bethany McGlyn is a graduate of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture and current Sewell C. Biggs Fellow at the Winterthur Museum, Garden, & Library. Her M.A. thesis, “Who Built the City on the Severn? Slavery, Material Culture, and Landscapes of Labor in Early Annapolis, 1760-1830,” foregrounded the lives of enslaved artisans and documented their work throughout the city. A chapter derived from this thesis is forthcoming in African American Material Culture on the Southern Landscape, a publication of the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive. Bethany is a co-curator of Bearing Witness, a reinstallation of the decorative arts galleries at Winterthur that explores the diversity of early American communities through objects in the permanent collection.

Samantha Nystrom is a Ph.D. Candidate and Dissertation Fellow in the English Department at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation, “Constructing Locality: Rooting Nineteenth-Century British Novels in Garden Culture,” uncovers the garden’s influence on the nineteenth-century novelistic imagination to suggest that the garden became a powerful and oft-used tool for novelists to interrogate how identities—spanning from the personal to the imperial—were developed. An article derived from this work is forthcoming in Studies in Romanticism. Her research has been supported by the University of Delaware Graduate College and Center for Material Culture Studies, along with the Keats-Shelley Association of America. 

For questions about the Animaterialities symposium, please email emergingscholars2020@udel.edu.

For more information about past Emerging Scholars Symposia: https://www.materialculture.udel.edu/index.php/opportunities/symposia/past/

Print Friendly, PDF & Email