We are delighted to announce the FAB-Musiconis project’s first cohort of five Columbia graduate students: 

Sadegh Ansari is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies. He has a  B.A. in Iranian Classical Music from the School of Performance Arts and Music in the College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran. His B.A. thesis was a commentary and critical edition of Kashf al-Awtār a Persian musical manuscript of the Gourkanid Court of Akbar. Sadegh also has an MA from Columbia’s Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies. His dissertation,“Pythagoras in Baghdad: Music Theoretical Writings of Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Urmawī, their Inception and Later Reception,” addresses the manuscript traditions of two treatises from the mid-thirteenth century.

Emogene S. Cataldo is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. She received her B.A. (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) with Distinction in Studio Art in 2010 from Carleton College. Prior to entering the Ph.D. program in 2014, Emogene collaborated with several museums through her work in interactive design and art education. At Columbia she is a graduate research assistant for Professor Stephen Murray’s Art Humanities website “Life of a Cathedral: Notre-Dame of Amiens.” In 2015-16 she was a Research Associate at Columbia’s Media Center for Art History.

Isabella M. Livorni is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Italian. She graduated from Barnard College in 2015 (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) with a BA in music and Italian, earning Departmental Honors in both as well as the Ethel Stone Lefrak Prize in Music and the Bettina Buonocore Salvo Prize in Italian. At Columbia she was a research assistant for the Casa Italiana History Project, and worked on the Marenzio Online Digital Edition using the Aruspix and Verovio software developed specifically for the project. In 2014 she served as creative director for the Digital Dante Sestina Project.

Tori Schmitt is a first-year MA student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. She holds a BA in Art History with a Minor in Digital Humanities from the University of California, Los Angeles (cum laude, with college honors and highest departmental honors as well as the UCLA Art History Department Eugene Wurzel Award for Scholastic Excellence), with an undergraduate thesis on “3D Modeling as Gothic Reconstruction: An Investigation into the Parisian Church of the Jacobins.” She was an Undergraduate Research Assistant and 3D Modeler for the UCLA project Paris: Past and Present. She also worked on the UCLA Digital Humanities Capstone: Getty Provenance Metadata. At Columbia she is a graduate research assistant for Professor Stephen Murray’s Art Humanities website “Life of a Cathedral: Notre-Dame of Amiens.”

Mariana-Cecilia Velázquez is a sixth-year doctoral student in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. She holds a B.A summa cum laude in Comparative Literature from the Universidad de Puerto Rico and an M.A. in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University. Her interests include Iberian, Caribbean, and Mediterranean cultural production, travel narratives, chronicles, and piracy from fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and she is writing a dissertation entitled “Travelers, Traders, and Traitors: Writing and Mapping Piracy in England, Spain, and the Caribbean (1570-1620).”