PhD alumna Ann Millett-Gallant is also an artist, and several of her works have been chosen for an exhibition at the National Humanities Center, “Esse Quam Videri.”

August 31–December 15, 2018

Exhibition Reception and Curator Talk: Thursday, September 20, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm

Esse Quam Videri [“To be, rather than to seem”] is an exhibition exploring North Carolina, its history, culture, and landscape, through the lens of disability. There are many experiences which we all share: romantic and familial love, employment, citizenship, education, and caregiving, to name a few. People with disabilities have typically been erased or considered disqualified from these experiences, yet they too participate in them. Following the curatorial theme of the overarching EVERYDAY project, this exhibition will showcase works that tell stories unique to North Carolina, using universal experiences or ideas, but presented in audacious ways—particularly based in the knowledge and creativity that disability brings to them. “To be, rather than to seem”: how can we explore through disability representation and disability aesthetics what disability history, knowledge, and culture is relative to North Carolina?

Works in this exhibit have been selected by jurors Ann M. Fox and Linda Dougherty. Fox and Dougherty will give a talk about the exhibit as part of the exhibition reception on September 20th.

https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/esse-quam-videri/

Congratulations to PhD candidate Ashley Bruckbauer, whose essay “Ambassadors à la turque: Assimilation and Dissimulation in Eighteenth-Century Images of French-Ottoman Diplomacy” was recently published in Tara Zanardi and Lynda Klich, eds., Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices (New York: Routledge, 2019).

Abstract:

Fashion played an essential role in the performance of cultural and political identities in eighteenth-century France. This was especially true in diplomatic exchanges and depictions of diplomatic figures, who represented their king and country abroad. Cultural cross-dressing, or the assumption of foreign attire, complicated this function of costume, however. While art historians have examined cultural cross-dressing in eighteenth-century aristocratic portraiture and representations of masked balls, the ambassador has remained a peripheral figure in studies of the popular phenomenon. This essay situates diplomacy at the center of an analysis of French dressing à la turque, examining paintings of French and Ottoman ambassadors adopting the dress, customs, and accoutrements of their hosts. I analyze how these representations of French-Ottoman diplomacy engage with eighteenth-century diplomatic practices and theories as well as popular conceptions of the ambassador as a social type. Contemporary treatises advised diplomats to act as protean characters, assimilating the manners of their foreign hosts. Simultaneously, critiques of the profession characterized the ambassador’s shape-shifting abilities as signs of his duplicitous nature. I argue that images of diplomacy featuring cultural cross-dressing manifest these contested notions of the ambassador, casting the figure as both a sensitive intermediary and a deceptive performer.

Now an assistant curator of American Art at the Worcester Art Museum, Art History alumna Erin Corrales-Diaz is part of an initiative there to add wall text to portraits that reveal the sitter’s ties to slavery. You can find her comments on the initiative in a recent article from Artnet: https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/worcester-art-museum-slavery-wall-text-1305407

Congratulations to Brantly Moore, who will be traveling to do research in Amsterdam this summer with grant funding from the University of Amsterdam! She will be participating in UA’s Summer Seminar, “Museum Objects as Evidence: Approaches to the Material World,” offered in conjunction with the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Bard Graduate Center.

Hannah Clager is one of two UNC alumni selected as 2018 Thomas R. Pickering Graduate Foreign Affairs Fellows. Recipients of the Pickering Fellowship receive two years of financial support and professional development to prepare them for a career in the U.S. Foreign Service. Fellows also complete a domestic internship at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., and an overseas internship at a U.S. embassy.

Managed and funded by the U.S. Department of State, consideration is given to qualified applicants who have displayed outstanding leadership skills and academic achievement. The fellowship aims to support those historically underrepresented in the U.S. Foreign Service, including women, minority groups and students with financial need.

Hannah Clager, from Lake Worth, Florida, will attend Harvard University this fall to pursue her master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies. Her studies will focus on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa; human rights and refugee affairs; and cultural diplomacy in the region. Clager earned her bachelor’s degree in 2013 with a major in art history and a minor in African studies. At UNC-Chapel Hill, she completed her art history honors thesis on the 2012 Dakar Biennale after seven months of fieldwork in Dakar, Senegal. She worked as a full-time paralegal for close to three years and then spent 14 months in Morocco as a Fulbright Student Researcher beginning in 2016, where she studied Arabic and completed a case study of the new Mohammed VI Modern and Contemporary Art Museum in Rabat.