Each year, the Center for Material Culture Studies awards Graduate Assistantships to University of Delaware graduate students interested in material culture studies. The Graduate Assistant for the Center manages the Center’s website, provides communication and administrative support, and assists with conference planning. The Thing Tank Graduate Assistant provides program and administrative support for the Thing Tank research forum. Applications for these positions are solicited in the Spring.
Current Graduate Assistants:
Graduate Assistant for the Center for Material Culture Studies
Meghan Angelos
Department of Art History
Meghan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History. She studies the history of photography, with a focus on photographs of motion. Her research explores photographs of dancers in early twentieth-century America.
Thing Tank Graduate Assistant
Mikayla Harden
Department of History
Mikayla Harden is an African-American Public Humanities Initiative fellow and doctoral candidate in the Department of History. She researches the material and spatial agency of enslaved children before 1865. Outside of being a graduate student, she volunteers at two non-profit organizations dedicated to addressing historical education and black maternal health disparities.
Past Graduate Assistants for the Center for Material Culture Studies:
Helena (Hee Eun) Kim (2021–2022)
Department of English
Helena is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. She examines the late eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century American fiction with a particular focus on transoceanic dialogues. Her broader research interests include material culture studies, ecocriticism, and gender studies.
Kristen Nassif (2020–2021)
Department of Art History
Kristen is a fifth-year doctoral student. She studies late-nineteenth-century American Art, with a focus on the intersections of art, science, and disability. Her research explores the visual and material culture of blindness.
Michael Doss (2019–2020)
Department of English
Michael is a fourth-year doctoral student in English. He studies 20th-century American literature with a focus on reading methods, material culture studies, and queer studies. The intersection of these approaches allows him to explore how objects in post-1945 American novels script the relationships between reader and text.
Alba Campo Rosillo (2018–2019)
Department of Art History
Alba is a fourth-year doctoral student. She works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art from the Americas, with a special focus on portraiture. Besides this, Alba is also interested in questions of materiality and beholding, international exchange, and the history of collections.
Jessica Venturi (2017–2018)
Department of English
Jessica is a second-year doctoral student. She is interested in 20th-century literature, with a focus on the interwar period and poverty in the United States. Her theoretical approach explores the ways in which trash/waste studies and the materiality of language/metaphor can inform (and re-form) our understandings of class, race, and gender in the modern era.
Eileen Moscoso (2016–2017)
Department of English
Eileen earned her M.A. in English at University of Delaware in 2017. Her research interests include 19th century American and African American literature, and print culture. She is particularly fascinated by questions of self-representation, racial identity and performance.