Chloe Millhauser, HART PhD student, has been selected as this year's exchange student to Humboldt University and will be starting the semester in Berlin soon.
Chloe is particularly excited to take classes in her area of study (German and modern/contemporary art, photography, and media studies) completely in German. She’s also very excited to be in Berlin in general because she anticipates being able to do important archival research for her dissertation, which will focus on the Berlin-based, interwar Worker Photography Movement and its connections to present day social media-based political movements.
“I also absolutely love Berlin as a city and am excited to spend an extended period of time there. I could read Thomas Mann in Berlin's public rose gardens forever! (and also eat 10 cinnamon Schneckens every day!)”
The Department of Art History at Rice offers an exchange program with Berlin’s Humboldt University where one student from their Institute for Art and Image History is able to attend Rice for an academic year and one of our graduate students is able to enroll in art history classes in Berlin. The exchange offers the opportunity for students to study and research in one of Europe’s most vibrant cities, building relationships with German scholars and taking advantage of the German capital’s proximity to significant sites, archives, and collections across Europe.
Chloe is studying interwar European avant-garde artistic practices, particularly German photography. Her most recent projects include a theory-based approach for examining German still life photography from the Neue Sachlichkeit genre and an investigation of Berlin Dadaist Raoul Hausmann’s knowledge of World War I–era prosthetic devices.
Past exchange students from Humboldt University include Caspar Krisch, who is currently a PhD student in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University specializing in German art post-1945, while HART has sent over grad student Marge Steurbaut and alumna Dasol Kim to Berlin in recent years.