Alicia Boswell is a contributor to the volume Golden Kingdoms: Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas, edited by Joanne Pillsbury, Timothy Potts, and Kim N. Richter (Getty Publications, 2017). The exhibition of the same name, currently at the Getty in Los Angeles, will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in February 2018. Her essay, titled “Facing Extreme El Niños at the Local Level,” published with colleagues Celeste Gagnon and Patrick Mullins, appears on the Social Science Research Research Council’s blog series Just Environments. She is also a co-author of an article appearing in the journal, Arnaldoa (Museo de Historia Natural of the Universidad Privada Antenor Orrego) 24, No. 1 (2017): 9-18, that reports on a new species of tuber plant discovered during excavations at Cerro Huancha in Collambay, Peru, her dissertation site.

Jeffrey Collins represented Bard Graduate Center at the symposium Full Circle: The Medal in Art History, held at the Frick Collection on September 8. The symposium was convened to honor Stephen Scher, whose gift of 450 medals to the Frick (the largest in the museum’s history) was celebrated in the exhibition The Pursuit of Immortality: Masterpieces from the Scher Collection of Portrait Medals. Collins’s paper, “Egentium Votis: Francesco Riccardi, Giovacchino Fortini, and the Art of Self-Promotion,” used an early eighteenth-century Florentine medal to explore the distinctive intersection of encomium and restraint in the visual and material culture of the Medici grand-ducal court. His lecture and the others presented during the day may be viewed here.

Urmila Mohan’s article, “Clothing as a Technology of Enchantment: Gaze and Glaze in Hindu Garments,” was part of a special issue on Shimmering Substances in the journal Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (University of Pennsylvania) 12, No. 2 (2017): 225-244. Another article by her titled “When Krishna Wore a Kimono: Deity Clothing as Rupture and Inefficacy” appears in the edited volume The Material Culture of Failure: When Things Do Wrong (Bloomsbury, 2017).

Elizabeth Simpson worked in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, Turkey, for a month during July and August, measuring, photographing, and drawing wooden objects from Tumulus P and Tumulus W, Gordion. This was for her forthcoming monograph, Gordion Wooden Objects, Vol. 2: The Furniture and Wooden Artifacts from Tumulus P, Tumulus W, and the City Mound (Leiden and Boston: Brill). She then travelled to England to meet Geoffrey Killen, a specialist in ancient Egyptian furniture. They were hosted at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, by Julie Dawson, head of conservation, and Elsbeth Geldhof, painting conservator, for a session on the construction of Egyptian coffins and efforts to reconstruct the way the coffins were painted and the materials used, including a special varnish, the constituents and application of which are not yet understood.