Aaron Glass received a 2020 Digital Extension Grant from The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), for the extension of an existing online platform to enable a new digital Critical Edition of Franz Boas and George Hunt’s landmark 1897 book, “The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians.” This year’s funded projects aim to significantly broaden digital archives, research capacities, and access to knowledge, connecting scholars around the world with illuminating cultural resources.

Paul Stirton will be retiring after ten years at the Bard Graduate Center. Watch Three Questions with Paul Stirton to look back on his time at BGC and read Dan Lee’s tribute to Paul’s 10 years with West 86th.

In February, Ivan Gaskell gave a lecture, “Still Life, Trompe l’oeil, and Vanity,” in the Masters Series at the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio. He participated in the vetting of Old Master paintings at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht, the Netherlands, for the twenty-fifth consecutive year. He published an exhibition review: “Fast Fashion: Die Schattenseiten der Mode (Fast Fashion: The Dark Sides of Fashion): Museum Europäischer Kulturen, Berlin, September 9, 2019–August 2, 2020,” in West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 26, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2019).

Caspar Meyer has published a book chapter “From Scythian Ethnography to Aryan Christianity: Herodotean Revolutions on the Eve of the Russian Revolution” in Herodotus in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Thomas Harrison and Joseph Skinner (Cambridge University Press, 2020). A journal article on “Ancient Vases in Modern Vitrines: The Sensory Dynamics and Social Implications of Museum Display” is due to appear in the June issue of the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies.

Jennifer Mass contributed an essay to the upcoming American Folk Art Museum exhibition catalogue American Weathervanes: The Art of the Winds. She also gave a March 4th presentation to the Materials Engineering Department at Caltech “Things Fall Apart: Materials Failures in Paul Cezanne’s and Edvard Munch’s Masterpieces”. She completed her manuscript on a restoration history of two Hellenistic black bronze fulcra for the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, and a catalogue essay for Cezanne’s Large Bathers at the Barnes Foundation. Her article in Science Advances, “Probing the chemistry of CdS paints in The Scream by in situ noninvasive spectroscopies and synchrotron radiation x-ray techniques” was published, and she completed a technical study of a collection Fulper famille rose ceramics for an upcoming article. On February 6th she gave a presentation at the National Arts Club for the Federal Bar Association on her research identifying Dead Sea Scroll forgeries as part of the “Art Authentication: Legal and Conceptual Developments” panel.

Deborah Krohn appears in a documentary film called “Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles,” made on the occasion of a program that took place at the Met in conjunction with the Visitors to Versailles exhibition in 2018. Krohn took part in a live discussion with chef Yotam Ottolenghi and was filmed in conversation with him about the event. The film was to have premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. It was reviewed on Salon.com.