2026 Brink Carrott Forster-Hahn Lecture Series
Thursday, April 30 at 5:30 in Arts 333
Emily Citino, 2025 Barbara B. Brink Travel Award
Taking Care: Anna Maria Maiolino in Archives Across São Paulo
PhD student Emily Citino will discuss her research trip to São Paulo to view archival materials on the Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino (b. 1942) housed at four institutions across the city. In her talk, Emily will provide a brief overview of her dissertation, Anna Maria Maiolino: Art, Gender, Displacement (1960s–2020s), which is the first monographic study, in any language, of the artist. Although Maiolino emerged during the authoritarianism of the 1960s and 1970s, Emily’s project shifts focus from the country’s military dictatorship’s (1964–1985) to the entrenched male chauvinism of Brazil’s Catholic, conservative society, tracing the artist’s dynamic experimentation across new and traditional media, from performance and video to drawing and sculpture, and situating Maiolino’s practice alongside the expansion of women’s rights in Brazil. Throughout her talk, Emily will discuss how the financial support of the Barbara B. Brink Travel Award launched her dissertation research, providing access to essential, non-digitized archival materials.
Xinqian Zhang, 2025 Richard G. Carrott Travel Award
Heaven’s Craft in the Making of Things: Revisit Jingdezhen’s Porcelain
This presentation reflects on my recent research trip to Beijing and Jingdezhen in China, where I explored porcelain from both museum collections and production sites. While I initially approached porcelain as an object of circulation and representation, closely tied to imperial power and global exchange, my experience in Jingdezhen began to shift this perspective. Encountering kiln sites, workshop environments, and local materials, I began to see porcelain not just as a delicate finished object, but as a process shaped by the interaction of earth, water, fire, human labor, and living experience in the ecology and cosmotechinics of early modern China. Drawing on Tiangong Kaiwu, a seventeenth-century text on craft and technology that informs the title of this talk, I consider how porcelain production reflects a broader cosmological and material understanding of making, and the embodied experience with porcelain in tea culture as a mental and physical healing related to the medical humanities. By moving between institutional spaces and lived environments, this talk highlights how travel-based research can transform the way we understand material culture, bridging objects, processes, and ecological contexts.
Rebecca Allen, 2025 Françoise Forster-Hahn Travel Award
Alchemical Secrecy in Manuscript and Print: Das Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit and Pandora
This talk examines the transition from manuscript to print in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European alchemical texts through a case study of two works: the early fifteenth-century manuscript Das Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit (1410–1419) and the later printed book Pandora, das ist, die edelste Gab Gottes (1582). Drawing on research conducted for my M.A. thesis, it is grounded in firsthand study of materials at the Kupferstichkabinett, Herzog August Bibliothek, and Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, supported by the Françoise Forster-Hahn Travel Award. Special attention is given to Cod. 78 A 11 at the Kupferstichkabinett, widely understood as the earliest extant copy of Heilige Dreifaltigkeit. Because this manuscript is not digitized, direct examination was essential to my analysis of its images and text. By comparing it with later manuscript copies and printed adaptations, the talk considers how material form and image-text relationships structure the transmission of alchemical knowledge.