Conversations
Vol. 8 (2019): Yesterday's Contemporaneity: Finding Temporality in the Past
Rae Di Cicco is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in Central European Modernism. Research for her dissertation, “The Body, the Kosmos, and the Other: The Cosmopolitan Imagination of Erika Giovanna Klien,” was supported by a Fulbright-Mach Fellowship in Austria in 2018-2019. The dissertation traces Klien’s career from her beginnings as a member of the Vienna-based modernist movement Kineticism (Kinetismus) to her immigration to the United States and subsequent work depicting indigenous groups of the American Southwest.
Rosabel Rosalind Kurth-Sofer is an artist from Los Angeles. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017 with a focus in printmaking, drawing, and painting. Rosabel received a Fulbright Combined Study-Research Grant in Austria for 2018-2019 to investigate Jewish caricatures in the Schlaff collection at the Jewish Museum Vienna. She currently lives in Chicago and continues to explore her Jewish identity through comics, poetry, and illustrated narratives.
Thomas Messersmith is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was a recipient of the Fulbright-Mach Study Award in Austria for 2018-2019, where he conducted research for his dissertation, tentatively titled “‘God Rather than Men:’ Austrian Catholic Theology and the Development of Catholic Political Culture, 1848-1888.” This dissertation utilizes both lay and Church sources to explore the ways in which theological and political shifts in the late Habsburg Monarchy influenced each other, ultimately creating a new national and transnational Catholic political culture.
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