Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center



Doctoral candidate Katherine de Vos Devine has been appointed Executive Director of the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center in Asheville, NC.  Beginning July 1, 2015, she will be responsible for providing strategic and operational leadership for the institution as it expands its facilities and programs.

Devine, who has been active in research and curatorial projects at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art, also received her J.D. degree from Duke in 2010. Her doctoral research uses legal and economic theory to address the impact of copyright legislation and jurisprudence on artistic practice from the 1970s to date. She is currently writing her thesis on the history of transformative use as a justification for artistic appropriation, expanding on existing guidance to offer new frameworks for assessing whether or not a work of appropriation art is truly transformative. Her dissertation topic is “Transformed: A History of Appropriation Art, Copyright Law, and Fair Use,” working under advisors Kristine Stiles, France Family Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies, and Hans van Miegroet, professor of art history and visual studies.


Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship



Doctoral candidate Camila Maroja has received a prestigious two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University. Maroja will be researching, writing, and teaching across an interdisciplinary cohort that includes the departments of History of Art and Architecture, Hispanic Studies, History, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Maroja’s dissertation topic is “Framing Latin American Art: Contemporary Institutions and the Configuration of a Regional Identity,” working under advisors Kristine Stiles, France Family Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies, and Esther Gabara, E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Art, Art History & Visual Studies.


Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship



Doctoral candidate Erica Sherman has been awarded a prestigious Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She studies architecture and urban development in colonial Latin America with a focus on Brazil in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sherman’s dissertation topic is “Urban Agents: Confraternities, Devotion and the Formation of a New Urban State in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais working under advisor Caroline Bruzelius, Anne M. Cogan Professor of Art History.”


Flaherty Film Seminar Fellowships

MFA|EDA students Michaela O'Brien and Jason Oppliger have been selected by the Robert Flaherty Foundation as recipients of Flaherty Film Seminar Fellowships for the summer of 2015.