Fellows

Yassin Oulad Daoud is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. His dissertation will focus on master stone carvers (lapicide/tagliapietre) in the fifteenth-century Italian-speaking world, specifically on problems of design, contracting, labor, technique and skill, interculturality, and reception, in order to better understand their artform in its own terms but also their role in the evolution of Renaissance sculpture and architecture. His other research interests include early Renaissance understandings of and artistic engagements with attention, linear perspective and spatial issues in early modern European art and architecture, art historiography and theory, and collecting and composition. Yassin received his B.A. in History of Art and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Fellow, 2018-19

PhD candidate, ABD

Project on Pastoral Power: A History, 100-130

Fellow, 2019, 2024

PhD Candidate 

PhD candidate Ianick Takaes de Oliveira received a Casa Muraro Summer Program Fellowship to help defray the costs of his participation in Columbia’s Summer Program in Venice. Ianick just finished his first year in the doctoral program in Art History and Archaeology, where he studies Renaissance art under the supervision of Professor Michael Cole.

Heidi began her PhD in the History department at Columbia in 2022, with a specialization in medieval social and religious history. Her research focuses on the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Venetian scuole, or lay devotional confraternities, and their links with ecclesiastical institutions. She is also interested in exploring the topics of class and hierarchy, how these were articulated along religious lines, and the ways in which the scuole both upheld and challenged prevailing notions of social and spiritual stratification. Her dissertation advisor is Neslihan Senocak.

Heidi graduated with a B.A. in History from Johns Hopkins University in 2020. Her senior honors thesis, “Prayer and Personal Identity: The Book of Hours and the Middle Class in Fifteenth-Century France,” received the Arthur Kouguell Memorial Prize for that year. She also completed an M.A. in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 2021.

Fellow, 2018-19

Professor of Music and Vice Chair, Department of Music, Columbia University

I’m currently at work on two book projects. The first, Lovebirds: Avian Erotic Entanglements in Medieval French and Occitan Literature, is about how birds, rather than being mere “symbols” of love, performed actual work with respect to the erotic experience. In each chapter, I turn to a different confluence of birds and human subjects (confluences I propose to call “entanglements”) and to what those confluences enabled erotically. In an introduction, I trace the history of the association between birds and love back to classical antiquity but also forward, showing that it endures to this day in our contemporary erotic vocabulary and imaginary. In the rest of the book, I argue that human-avian entanglements made possible: a type of language that foregrounds the corporeal and sensorial over the semantic (chapter 1, “Pidgin Poetics”), erotic affects such as desire and pleasure (chapter 2, “The Wings of Desire”), the pivoting of love objects (chapter 3, “The Falcon as Fulcrum”), and memory of the love object (chapter 4, “Mnemonic Birds”). In a coda, I explore how metamorphosis into a bird seems to be a requisite condition for physical erotic contact, and especially for procreation, in much medieval literature.

My second book project concerns plant grafting and the way in which it became a way to think through different models of temporality and queer parturition.

I’m also the author of Stolen Song: How the Troubadours Became French (Cornell University Press, 2020), which documented for the first time the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French, and the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing song.

Fellow, 2018-19

David Rosand Associate Professor of Italian Renaissance Art History, Columbia University

Fellow, 2018-19

PhD candidate, ABD

Beatrice joined the PhD program in the Fall of 2023, specializing in Renaissance and Baroque Architecture. Her primary research focuses on historical sources and fragments as fragile means of knowledge over the centuries. Additionally, her research interests include the intersections of national influences between Italy and France, the intellectual property of architects and the reuse of spolia materials during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Beatrice earned her Bachelor's (2020) and Master's (2022) degrees in Architecture from the University IUAV of Venice, both with distinction. Part of the research for her Master’s final thesis, titled “Bernin in Paris: An Unsolved Project Between the Louvre and the Tuileries Palace”, was conducted at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville and received academic recognition from the University IUAV of Venice.

Fellow, 2018-19

PhD candidate