Elizabeth Brown is a fifth year PhD candidate in art history working under the advisement of Dr. Kristine Stiles, France Family Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. She studies contemporary art and visual culture in the United States. Her dissertation explores artist Theaster Gates’ social and architectural collaborations and interventions, particularly his non-profit ReBuild Foundation, established in 2010, which is an extension of his Chicago-based studio practice in all media. She received her B.A. in Art History from Manhattanville College, New York. She completed her M.A. in Art History from Hunter College, New York. There she wrote her master’s thesis on the disorienting late eighties and early nineties installations of L.A.-based artist Mike Kelley (1954-2012) and New York-based artist Cady Noland, focusing on the contradictions and hypocrisies of American culture, which their art brought to light. Before entering the doctoral program at Duke, she held positions at the Guggenheim Museum and The Studio Museum in Harlem in New York. Elizabeth was the graduate assistant for the Visualizing Cities Lab for the academic year 2020-2021.
Nicole Y. Gaglia is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. Under the supervision of Professor Gennifer Weisenfeld, Nicole is completing her dissertation, titled “Visualizing Bodies: Public Health and the Medicalized Everyday in Modern Japan.” Her project examines images to ask how visuality shaped public discourses on health, the body, and sociality in modern Japan. Nicole received a BA in Art History summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from University of California, Irvine in 2007, and a MA in East Asian Studies from University of California, Los Angeles in 2014. She has a background in digital humanities, beginning with the project Imaging Kantō: Mapping Japan’s 1923 Great Earthquake through Visual Culture in 2016. She is the graduate assistant for the Visualizing Cities Lab for the 2021-2022 academic year.
Hannah Jacobs provides instruction and conducts research in digital concepts and tools for Wired! courses and projects. She leads tutorials and workshops, collaborates with faculty to develop and implement digital humanities projects in the classroom, consults on faculty research, offers advising on digital tools for undergraduate and Master’s student theses, provides technical support for lab projects, and liaises with other digital humanities staff at Duke.
John Taormina is Curator of Visual Resources in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. Taormina received his B.A. in Art History from John Carroll University and M.A. in Art History from The George Washington University. From 1982-1999, he was head of the visual resources/image collections at The George Washington University, Oberlin College, The Ohio State University, and the University of Michigan. Taormina came to Duke in 2000, where he oversees all aspects of the digital and analog image collections. He also manages the Department’s communication program and the Department’s exhibition spaces in Smith Warehouse. Taormina served for 10 years as editor of the VRA Bulletin, the journal of the Visual Resources Association, the international organization of image media professionals, and served on the VRA Executive Board for seven years. Taormina has been the metadata and image consultant to the Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database project since its inception in 2011. In 2015, he co-organized with Caroline Bruzelius the Wired! Lab’s first symposium, “Apps, Maps & Models: Digital Pedagogy and Research in Art History, Archaeology & Visual Studies.” Since 2018, he has been part of the Building Duke Bass Connections project team. After three years of research, Taormina published his 150-page Digital Humanities Bibliography in 2019, with ongoing revisions and additions.
