HCAH Awards 2013 Summer Internships

This summer, the John B. Hurford '60 Center for the Arts and Humanities (HCAH) will support 16 Haverford students who are undertaking an array of local and national internships and independent research projects. HCAH's mission is to enhance the intellectual and cultural life at Haverford by fostering challenging exchange among faculty, students and diverse communities of writers, artists, performers, thinkers, activists, and innovators. To that end, the Center sponsors programs throughout the year that promote relationships between classic humanistic study and contemporary intellectual, artistic and ethical currents in the wider public world.

HCAH supports four types of internships. Philadelphia Partners Internships match Haverford students with nationally recognized local organizations committed to rich intellectual and artistic engagement with local undergraduates. Self-designed internships are projects created by rising juniors and seniors at host arts and culture organizations. Summer Research Fellowships are competitive grants designed to support thesis-related or otherwise substantive research projects, enabling students to spend the summer visiting archives, learning a language necessary to project research, or dedicating their time to a focused program of reading. And finally, the Center also supports any Haverford student accepted into the Philadelphia Museum of Art's prestigious Museum Studies Internship Program.

HCAH had a record number of applicants for this summer's internship funding, and Center Director Laura McGrane is thrilled with the quality and diversity of placements this year.“The national trend toward unpaid internships makes arts and culture programs like the Philadelphia Partners and Self Design Internships all the more valuable for our undergrads,” says McGrane.“We look forward to building on their new areas of expertise when these students return in the fall.”

In the end, six students were chosen for Philadelphia Partners Internships, three students are undertaking self-designed internships, two are Summer Research Fellows and five Fords will be PMA Museum Studies Interns. The latter group represents a particular success for the Center as PMA draws from a national pool that includes art history graduate students, MBAs, law students and other undergraduates, and this year, one ninth of their entire summer internship program is comprised of Fords.

“I'm excited that so many students who worked at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery this school year will have the opportunity to extend their learning at the Philadelphia Museum of Art this summer," says Campus Exhibitions Coordinator Matthew Seamus Callinan.

A complete list of interns is below:

Philadelphia Partners Internships

Kat Poje '16 will explore curatorial work in the Print and Books Department at The Library Company of Philadelphia, America's oldest cultural institution and the original Library of Congress.

Alexandra Wolkoff '14 will work on an oral history component of the project,“The Ward: Race and Class in Du Bois' Seventh Ward” (formerly Mapping Du Bois) at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.

Kate Monahan '14 will research monograph, photograph and ephemera collections at the Mütter Museum and Historical Medical Library to identify items with strong visual interest for a project that is part of the Library's 225th anniversary celebration.

Maya Beale '15 will support information management for the Festival Guide and contribute to the Festival Blog for FringeArts (formerly Philadelphia Live Arts and Philly Fringe Festivals).

Alice Thatcher '14 will help create an online audience-engagement strategy for a Pig Iron Theatre Company project, inviting the public to contribute stories, videos and artwork inspired by the site-specific show Pay Up.

Ellen Reinhart '15 will assist the Pennsylvania Humanities Council in implementing a strategic plan that calls for redirecting its programming, advocacy, marketing, and fundraising while also developing new programs, including a Teen Reading Lounge, which uses graphic novels to promote critical thinking and social engagement among teens and tweens at libraries.

Self-Designed Internships

Elizabeth Peters '15 will work in the curatorial and conservation departments of the Higgins Armory Museum, in Worcester, Mass., helping to support the museum's 2014 merger with the Worcester Art Museum.

Michael Rushmore '14 will be working with The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program's director of communications on developing social media strategies and new content for their existing social media platforms.

Rilka Spieler '14 will work with the chief registrar and associate curator of Philadelphia's National Museum of American Jewish History to archive and research a collection of artifacts from a descendent of the first four Jewish permanent settlers in Huntsville, Ala.

Research Fellowships

Samuel Fox '14 (Anthropology and Creative Writing) will research ethnographic and fictional methods of writing culture, as applied to violence surrounding immigration on the Mexico-United States border. Traveling to Tucson, Ariz., to conduct fieldwork and access the University of Arizona libraries' special collections, he plans to finish a novella drawing on his research and establish the foundation for his senior thesis.

Ian Gavigan '14 (Religion and History) will travel to Germany to visit the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin's Newspaper Collection Archive, exploring German public discourse and the circulation of vocabularies of race, Aryanism and Anti-Semitism from roughly 1850-1914. In particular, his project focuses on the roles played by philologists in the production and dissemination of vocabularies of human difference in the public sphere.

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum Studies Internships

Anna Benjamin '13 will be working in the education department with the Museum's new Art Splash program for children and their families.

Noelia Hobeika '13 will work in the editorial department, assisting with copyediting and proofreading exhibition-related texts and labels and printed materials such as newsletters, brochures and signs.

Aubree Penney '13 will work as part of the development team for events involving any of their targeted groups, researching granting agencies, foundations and individuals.

Valerie Smosna '13 will observe a wide variety of conservation techniques in painting, objects, furniture, paper and textile conservation as part of her work with the conservation department.

Alex Tonsing '13 will assist with library and archival research for the European Painting Pre-1900 department.

-Rebecca Raber