Click to View the 2021 QP Symposium Program
The QP, as we call it, is the capstone project and is required for all graduating students. As you will see, the topics are wide-ranging, innovative, and unusual. From an ancient Red Sea trading post, to Renaissance incense burners, to contemporary textile art, and from all corners of the globe, they embody the kind of curiosity and creativity that we like to cultivate in our students. The QP can take several forms: traditional essays, digital projects, and mock exhibitions designed using Google SketchUp. The projects typically begin as term papers in elective classes, take shape over the entire second year of the program, and must be completed while the students are enrolled in a full slate of classes with their own requirements. With the term paper as a starting point, the students work together with faculty to identify areas for broadening, expanding, and deepening their research, often undertaking some form of archival or object-based exploration. This year was especially challenging, with many students having to undertake research and writing in fully remote circumstances, requiring unique solutions for accessing sources. Needless to say, we, the faculty, are extremely proud of the work they have done, and hope you will find the abstracts and images below as impressive and edifying as we do.
–Deborah L. Krohn, Associate Professor and Chair of Academic Programs
2021 Qualifying Paper Symposium Schedule
1:30 pm
Welcoming Remarks
Prof. Susan Weber, Founder & Director
Prof. Peter N. Miller, Dean
Prof. Deborah Krohn, Chair of Academic Programs
1:45 pm
Introduction by Prof. Andrew Morrall
Group I: International Trade and Transcultural Interactions
Juliana Fagua Arias
Seafaring Treasures: Latin America and the Transpacific Trade
Weixun Qu
The Afterlife of Lacquer Panels: Transforming Chinese Luxuries into French Furniture
Cynthia Volk
Dehua Porcelain Figures of Budai: Models of Adaptivity in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century China and “Europe”
Constantine Sidamon- Eristoff
The Lives of Berenike: A Port City and Its People
BREAK
2:45 pm
Group II: Material Culture and Gender: Education, Dress, Textile Art
Natalie DeQuarto
“A Little World of Themselves”: Women and the Cultivation of Fern Cases in the Nineteenth Century
Emily Isakson
Imitating the Flower: Nineteenth-Century Artificial Plants and Gendered Botanical Education
Daria Murphy
Tonsorial Transformations: Women’s Sokuhatsu in Nineteenth-Century Meiji Japan
Jessie Mordine Young
On Anne Wilson and Winding the Warp: Embodied and Tacit Knowledge in Contemporary Textile Art
BREAK
3:45 pm
Group III: Objects of Healing from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment
Madison Jane Williams
Science in the Study and Authentication of Catholic Relics
Madison Clyburn
Perfumed Air and Scented Bodies: Materializing the Philosophy of Scent in Sixteenth-Century Padua
Noah Dubay
Comfort and Convalescence: Fauteuils de Malade in Eighteenth-Century France
4:30 pm
Toast to the MA Class of 2021
