Student Spotlight: Eilis Coughlin, PhD Student
2023-2024 William A. Camfield Graduate Fellow
Congratulations to Eilis for receiving the William A. Camfield Graduate Fellowship! As a Camfield Fellow, Eilis will work in the coming academic year at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston under the guidance of a professional museum curator in the Prints and Drawings Department.
Eilis' research focuses on Angevin Naples and the art of the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. More specifically, she is interested in female patronage, objects and spaces of gendered devotion, and the movement and representation of non-Christians and non-white people in Southern Italy. Her dissertation project analyzes a Neapolitan manuscript made for an élite woman in the fourteenth century.
“I am particularly excited to collaborate with the Prints and Drawings Department because my undergraduate and master’s theses, as well the project for my doctoral dissertation deal with medieval manuscripts. I have also written about and studied Islamic, specifically Persianate, book arts with Professor Farshid Emami. While my research has mostly focused on iconographic issues and text-image relations, I am also very interested in understanding and learning about the materiality of the works in the Prints and Drawings Department and the techniques that go into their production. The care, conservation, and display of works on paper are also of great interest to me and I look forward to learning about these aspects of the life of the object at the MFAH.”