Proposal Fall 2020 Faculty Focus Myzelev

Sponsored Research Newsletter Fall 2020

Art Historian and World Citizen

Assistant Professor of Art History and Coordinator of the Museum Studies Minor Alla Myzelev’s comparative perspective in art and culture is constantly expanding, reflecting her lived experiences in several cultures. Born in Ukraine, Alla moved to Israel as a teenager and finished her undergraduate degree there with a double major in History of Art and French Studies. She earned her MA and PhD in Art and Visual Culture at York University and Queens University, respectively, in Canada. She was awarded two postdocs, one funded by the Mellon Foundation in London, England, and one funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. Afterwards she was curator at art institutions and taught at several institutions of higher education in Canada and the U.S.

In 2014 Alla came to SUNY Geneseo. Her areas of scholarly research include fashion and gender; modern and contemporary art and material culture in Eastern Europe; North American modern and contemporary (late 20th and 21st century) visual and material culture, design and practice; Museums theory and practice; Gender identity and third-wave feminism; and Design and craft theory and research methodology. Alla continues to undertake international scholarly research and has delved into digitization projects, both of which she has funded with an impressive array of fellowships and grants. She also occasionally takes on curatorial work. Currently, Alla and Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History Lynette Bosch-Burroughs, supported by Geneseo’s Proposal Writing Support Award, are developing a National Endowment for the Humanities application to develop a Museum Studies Major.

In 2017 Alla was awarded an IITG Tier 1 grant and in 2018 a Tier 2 grant to develop a digital object repository of objects related to women's arts and crafts such as embroidery, knitting, and sewing objects that can be used to create teachable content for anthropology, art history, history and other humanities. Timestich (http://timestitch.geneseo.edu/items/browse) crowdsources materials and trains museum studies students to curate online content and create virtual exhibitions. Using OMEKA, an open source web-publishing platform, Alla and her students developed a database of more than 3,000 catalogued and photographed objects. While creating the TimeStitch platform, Alla became interested in possibilities that virtual and augmented reality (VR) can offer to teaching art history, for example taking students to virtual exhibits at international museums such as La Louevre and expanding their comparative perspectives. She is also seeking funding to develop her incipient VR skills.