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Office of Academic Appointments and Internships

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Hawaiian Plant Lineage With an Identity Crisis

Using current technological and scientific advances, we are able to observe a snapshot of a plant group that is rapidly diversifying.

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From Gutter Cats to Great Cats

The Journey of Craig Saffoe, Curator of Great Cats at the Smithsonian's National Zoo

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Conserving Modern and Contemporary American Art

Research and conservation of paintings at the Lunder Conservation Center in Washington, DC.

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Activating the Learning Potential of Digitized Museum Objects with the Smithsonian Learning Lab

How can digital tools help educators to foster meaningful learning experiences with museum objects? How can museum- and school-based practices inform each other? What role can technology play in this process?

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Of Cables and Serpents

Why the transatlantic telegraph cable conjured dreams of sea monsters.

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Life in the (Urban) Jungle

As more species face urbanization worldwide, understanding the impacts of urbanization on species is vital to properly assess how our behaviors as humans are influencing and altering ecosystems and species.

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MoMA’s first International Exhibition Three Centuries of American Art (1938)

With over 750 artworks on view in Paris ranging from seventeenth-century colonial portraits to Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie (1928) and spanning architecture, film, folk art, painting, prints, and sculpture, Three Centuries was the most comprehensive display of American art to date in Europe and a vital contributor to the internationalization of American art.

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How Do You Like Your Eggs?

Burrowing crayfish are key resources in many ecosystems across the planet, and yet their secretive lifestyles mean we know very little about them.

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Life in the Field from the Mountains to the Bay

To the uninitiated, the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute sounds like a weird rumor. I first learned of it as a teen, trekking the Appalachian Trail with the Boy Scouts. Stumbling down the trail, we came to a chain link fence with U.S. PROPERTY signs tacked up along its length.

Using Drones to Monitor Tropical Forests in 3 Dimensions

Will forests grow faster, or more efficiently, as atmospheric carbon dioxide increases? Will trees face higher mortality rates as storms and droughts become more common?

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Bouncing Back in a Warming World

We have not given corals enough credit for their resilience and ability to bounce back. Panama's Tropical Eastern Pacific provides a glimpse into the diverse strategies corals are implementing to survive in an increasingly warmer, high CO2 world.

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Fostering Interpersonal Exchange as a Virtual Smithsonian Intern

My work with the Smithsonian has helped me realize that virtual meetings and Zoom calls are no longer limited to the time of global pandemics.

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Discovering What Lies Below the Surface in the American Prairie

The story of the true ecological importance of this land however is less about what is seen, and more about what lies on and below the surface of this grassland area

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Which “Eraser” Reigns Supreme?

MCI Postdoctoral Fellow hosts a conservation workshop on the “Dry Cleaning of Soot-Coated Papers”

Unhealthy and dying seedlings in the forests of Panama.

My Life Coach, the Forest

While we often think negatively of plant diseases in the context of agriculture, in a natural forest, disease-causing fungi (fungal pathogens) can promote overall health and diversity.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, an example of an art hanging storage

Can Virtual Internships Help Protect Vulnerable Collections at the Smithsonian?

Every collections steward’s worst nightmare is receiving notification that a collections storage space has been damaged by a water or fire incident. Museum collections professionals are concerned with everyday threats like small or persistent water leaks, and larger, catastrophic events such as natural disasters, mechanical or operating system failures, or fires. Effective ways to prevent and prepare for a collections emergency is to perform risk assessments and to create an emergency response and recovery plan. Such a plan provides staff with an understanding of an action before it has occurred and informs them on how to react if an emergency emerges.

Amelia Joe-Chandler, Hogan Teapot, 2013. Hammered copper and cast silver. 7.5 x 11 x 9cm. National Museum of the American Indian, 26/9781. Photo courtesy of the artist, Amelia Joe-Chandler.

Steeped in Memory: Amelia Joe-Chandler’s Hogan Teapot at NMAI

Nestled in an archival box in the storage vaults of the National Museum of the American Indian, I encountered a small, copper sculpture that points to an entirely different sense of place. Hogan Teapot (2013) by Diné (Navajo) artist Amelia Joe-Chandler is a living homage to the idea of home—particularly her family’s home in Dinétah, the ancestral homelands of the Navajo Nation in the American Southwest. The brilliancy of the copper recalls the traditional form of the hogan, a dome-shaped structure with a log or stone framework that is traditionally covered with mud that hardens like rock. With a door outlined in silver on the side, the lid handle as a stove pipe, and a cast tree and two small sheep as the handle, Joe-Chandler’s sculpture changes the ubiquitous form of the teapot into a site of personal encounter through these allusions to her family’s home.

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A Painted Homage to A Political Giant: G.P.A. Healy’s Posthumous Portrait of President Lincoln

U.S. artist George Peter Alexander Healy’s (1813 – 1894) 1887 portrait of President Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865) was the culmination of a career devoted to presidential portraiture. The image, conceived years after the sitter passed away, helps us understand the practice of nineteenth-century portraiture as much as the challenge of posthumous portrait painting. The result of Healy’s work is an iconic image of a political giant that still resonates today.

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Taking a Closer Look: Glass Collections at the Smithsonian

Glass is often thought of as a very stable, unchanging material. That, unless you drop it, it will be around forever. This, however, is far from the truth. Glass undergoes a unique and insidious type of degradation. It interacts with the humidity in the atmosphere, swapping out some of its own components for water, forming a brittle layer that most will recognize as the white scum that forms on glasses that have been run through the dishwasher a few too many times. This degradation, referred to as glass alteration, happens slowly, taking decades if not centuries to be noticeable. For most glass, glass alteration doesn’t really matter – the object is likely to be dropped or lost before anyone notices a change. But for glass objects in museums, some of which have been around for millennia, and all of which are intended to last a lot longer, the slow time scale of alteration can become a problem.

woman’s robes (munisak) - Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Guido Goldman, left: S2004.96; right: S2005.17.

The Power of Color: Using Synthetic Dyes as a Dating Tool for Museum Textiles

The desire to apply color to a surface is intrinsic to human nature and humans have searched for natural sources of color since prehistoric times. They found out that some minerals could be ground to obtain a fine powder, and this was the origin of the mineral pigments. But they also found out that some plants and animals (insects and mollusks) could yield color when mixed with hot water, and this was the origin of natural dyes. Pigments are suitable to be applied on surfaces by mixing them with a binding medium. Dyes can be applied to fibers in several ways in a water solution. This discovery led to one of the most spectacular forms of art and craftsmanship: dyed textiles.

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