Help us in congratulating two of History of Art’s graduate students, Kailani Polzak and William Ma, recipients of the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award!

The Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (OGSI) Award honors over 200 UC Berkeley GSIs each year for their outstanding work in the teaching of undergraduates. These OGSI recipients are nominated from within their teaching department. The GSI Teaching & Resource Center gives the award recipients certificates of distinction and a celebratory Outstanding GSI Award Ceremony which will take place on Tuesday, May 3, 2016 in the International House.

More about the Awardees:

Kailani Polzak (2008) is a Ph.D. candidate working on British, French, and Russian voyages to the Pacific and the picturing of human difference in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

William H. Ma (2008) is writing a dissertation on the art and craft workshops at the French Jesuit Orphanage Tushanwan in Shanghai in the early twentieth century. His main areas of interest include the artistic exchange between China and the West (Europe and America) during the late-imperial period, regionalism in Chinese art, and Chinese export art in Guangzhou (Canton).

Mellon Initiative for Graduate Study in Curatorial Preparedness and Object-Based Learning Graduate students in History of Art at Berkeley have the option of participating in a three-year pilot program sponsored by the Mellon Foundation supplementing academic training with curatorial skills. Starting in the fall of 2013, graduate seminars will have more museum, collection, and site visits, and a new course will be offered on object analysis in museum conservation studios and sites of production.  Students will also have the opportunity to help produce an exhibition using Berkeley’s far-ranging object collections.   Additionally, each semester an advanced graduate student will have the opportunity to intern in a collection rich in the materials that form the focus of his or her special expertise. In Fall 2013 William Ma will be at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.  In Spring 2014 Laure Marest-Caffey will be at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, serving as Curatorial Intern.  She will be working on exhibition, acquisition, and research projects in the Department of Art of the Ancient World, Classical Section, as well as studying the MFA's remarkable collection of Hellenistic portrait g... [show more]