Francis E. Hyslop Memorial Graduate Fellowship
Ph.D. candidate Noah Dasinger was this year’s recipient of the Francis E. Hyslop Memorial Graduate Fellowship. In May 2025, he traveled to Pavia, Italy, to carry out photographic research for his project, “Microcosm and Mausoleum: The Tomb Monument of Gian Galeazzo Visconti in the Certosa di Pavia.” For his research, the Ministero di Cultura and the Musei Regionali di Lombardia, two institutions that oversee cultural foundations in Pavia and the surrounding area, granted Noah special permission to photograph the tomb monument of the late Duke of Milan, Gian Galeazzo Visconti, in the Certosa di Pavia. The Carthusian occupants have forbidden photography of the Certosa and its patrimony for decades. It was only with the special permission that Noah was able to photograph the tomb monument. The Certosa di Pavia is a Carthusian monastery located 10 kilometers from Pavia’s city center. In 1397, Duke Gian Galeazzo founded the Certosa as a personal mausoleum. It took another 100 years for the duke’s successors to complete the monument in 1497. Noah’s research argues that the tomb monument’s scale condensed the function and history of the Certosa’s establishment into a miniaturized format, ensuring that no spectator left without fully understanding the role of the Viscontian church/mausoleum, as well as Gian Galeazzo’s motivation for its establishment. Before this research trip, Noah was unable to illustrate his argument in his research due to the unavailability of photographs online. Thanks to the Hyslop Fellowship, Noah returned to the United States with thousands of high-quality pictures that he plans to use for his research and eventually share with the academic community.
Drew Stewart Popjoy Fund for Travel and Experiential Learning
In January 2025, Lindsay Cook traveled to Paris with eight students who had taken her seminar, Medieval Art: Theories & Practices of Conservation, to visit the Gothic cathedral Notre-Dame of Paris and several related sites. The cathedral itself had just reopened to the public for the first time since a catastrophic 2019 fire badly damaged the building. The trip also coincided with two special exhibitions about Notre-Dame at the Musée de Cluny: Making Stones Speak: Notre-Dame’s Medieval Sculptures and Leafing Through Notre-Dame: Masterpieces from the Medieval Library. Dr. Cook had secured a grant from the College Art Association’s Fund for Travel to Special Exhibitions to take students to the two exhibitions. However, if not for the additional support from the Popjoy Fund, she would have had to both shorten the length of the trip and restrict participation solely to graduate students. The Popjoy Fund also made it possible for them to visit additional museums and sites, including Saint-Denis, the Sainte-Chapelle, and the Musée du Louvre. The seminar trip was nothing short of magical. The day they arrived in Paris, they went to the former abbey church Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where Dr. Cook led a site visit to set the stage for visits to Notre-Dame. Next, they took the Metro to Notre-Dame, where they made a loop around the perimeter of the building despite the pouring rain, giving them a chance to watch the gargoyles work. Then, finally, after a semester of intensive study, they entered Notre-Dame for the first of two visits. Dr. Cook invited students to explore the cathedral on their own, answering their many questions as she checked in with them along the way. The next morning, the group visited the Sainte-Chapelle before returning to Notre-Dame for a second site visit. This time, they focused on the cathedral’s exterior and interior sculpture, especially the remaining segments of its painted stone choir screen. They spent the rest of the day at the Musée de Cluny, visiting the special exhibitions about Notre-Dame’s medieval sculpture and manuscripts. The highlight was undoubtedly seeing the colorfully painted stone fragments of the 13th-century rood screen (jubé) discovered underneath the cathedral’s crossing during an archaeological excavation necessitated by the recent fire. While medieval art historians already knew that Notre-Dame had such a screen, this is apparently the first time anyone has seen these extraordinary examples of Gothic sculpture since they were buried under the cathedral’s pavement following the screen’s demolition in the 18th century. On the last full day in Paris, they spent the morning at Saint-Denis, the former abbey church and longtime royal necropolis, and, like Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle, a site key to the formation of the modern notion of cultural heritage. In the afternoon, they spent time analyzing some of the precious objects from Saint-Denis’s medieval treasury, now in the permanent collection of the Louvre. The museum was open late that night, so many students lingered at the Louvre until closing.
Chang Tan was able to take 40 students and three colleagues to the Cleveland Museum of Art in October of 2025. They examined the collections of Asian and Medieval art in the museum, which are among the best in the world. Her classes visited exhibitions such as Refocus Photography: China at the Millenium; Landscape by Arnold Chang: A Retrospective; and Practice and Play in Japanese Art. They had lively discussions in front of the artworks, and Dr. Tan was especially delighted by how strong an impression the visit made on several first-year students in the cohort. None of them was an art history major and they rarely went to museums on their own. They were dazzled by the range and quality of Buddhist art in the galleries, some of which Dr. Tan had discussed in class. They also learned to appreciate the more avant-garde works, with one student stating that she never thought that one could learn so much about the history and sociopolitical circumstances of foreign cultures from such seemingly strange images. They found the works that incorporated personal photos relatable and discussed how displaying objects in museums was different from—or similar to—sharing them on social media.