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
Dakota H. Stevens (2024-2025)
Department of Art History
Dakota is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History. His research focuses on the intersections of wall and earth in Indigenous-authored murals. He sees these murals as sites that renew visual sovereignty and reestablish Indigenous connections to the land.
Past Graduate Assistants for the Center for Material Culture Studies:
Juliana Jones-Beaton (2023-2024)
Department of English
Juliana is a doctoral student in the Department of English. Her research deals with fungal networks and mycelial possibilities in post 1989 speculative fiction.
Meghan Angelos (2022-2023)
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.
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 Nassif is the Curator of Collections at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. Prior to joining the Fralin, Kristen was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at The Walters Art Museum. Kristen received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Delaware in 2022. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American art, visual culture, material culture, and disability history.
Michael Doss (2019–2020)
Department of English
Dr. Michael Doss completed his PhD in English in 2022. He focused on how representations of war objects in post-45 American novels grapple with “political feelings,” or affective responses that reveal and direct our sociopolitical belongings. Now, Dr. Doss is an adjunct professor of English at the University of Delaware and the Community College of Philadelphia. He teaches a range of classes to include first-year writing, WWII literature and film, and Gossip as Narrative and News.
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.
Past Graduate Assistants for Thing Tank:
Aradhya Sodhi
Department of Fashion and Apparel Studies
Aradhya is a second-year master’s student in the Department of Fashion and Apparel Studies. She is interested in the fashion supply chain, as well as upcycling and its business aspects.