AUTHORS AND PROJECT DIRECTORS

Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, PhD
Professor, Department of Art History, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia
Author and Project Director

A specialist of arts of West Africa, Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi has completed more than twenty-two months of fieldwork in Burkina Faso. She has also traveled to Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Mali. Gagliardi conceived Mapping Senufo while examining photographs in the archives of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris in April 2013. At the time, she was preparing to write Senufo Unbound: Dynamics of Art and Identity in West Africa, published in 2015 by the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) and 5 Continents Editions to accompany the CMA’s exhibition Senufo: Art and Identity in West Africa. When Gagliardi joined the Emory University faculty in August 2013, she launched Mapping Senufo with support from the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. The project has led her to participate in the 2014 Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art History funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the 2018 From Prototype to Published KairosCamp funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Constantine (Costa) Petridis, PhD
Rita Knox Chair and Curator, Arts of Africa, The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
Co-Author and Co-Project Director

Constantine Petridis joined the Mapping Senufo project in April 2015 after curating the Cleveland Museum of Art’s exhibition Senufo: Art and Identity in West Africa. Arts identified as Senufo have long captured his attention. A specialist of the sculpture of Central Africa, he received his PhD in African art history from the Universiteit Gent in Belgium, where Belgian art historian Albert Maesen completed his 1946 dissertation based on path-breaking field research in Senufo communities of northern Côte d’Ivoire in 1939. Petridis has traveled to and initiated research projects in Burkina Faso and Ghana, and he has also visited Côte d’Ivoire and Mali. In November 2016, Petridis joined the curatorial team at the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the three venues for the now-defunct Museum of Primitive Art’s 1963 exhibition Senufo Sculpture from West Africa.

COLLABORATORS

Nicole Corrigan, PhD
Visual Resources Librarian, Art History, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Nicole Corrigan received her PhD in medieval European art history from Emory University in 2020. She taught introductory art history courses at Auburn University from 2020-2021 and taught medieval European, Islamic, and colonial South American art at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga from 2021-2023. Since March 2023, when she became the Visual Resources Librarian in the Art History Department at Emory, she has worked with faculty to contribute to the development of digital humanities projects and to support image digitization. She also teaches an undergraduate digital art history course.

Jennifer Doty, MSI
Research Data Librarian, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Jennifer Doty provides data management services to Emory University researchers as the Research Data Librarian in the Robert W. Woodruff Library. She has more than twelve years of experience supporting data-intensive research at higher education institutions in the US and the UK, including several projects in the humanities and social sciences.

Anandi Silva Knuppel, PhD
Senior Digital Scholarship Specialist, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Anandi Silva Knuppel received her PhD in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University, where she focused on themes of lived religion, multisensory ethnography, and religious practices in transnational Hindu traditions. Anandi partners with faculty, librarians, students, and staff in the creation of digital projects supporting research, pedagogy, and publishing. She also manages the Digital Scholarship Internship Program (DSIP) that provides internship opportunities to graduate students and undergraduates.

Yang Li
Senior Software Engineer, UI/UX Designer, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

As a software engineer, Yang seeks opportunities to apply innovative media and computer technologies to the preservation and promotion of digital scholarship. He works with the project team in the design, development, and revision of new and existing digital media projects. As a designer, he formulates information architecture, creates wireframes, mockups, and prototypes. He also experiments with new technologies, work processes, and management patterns that can be integrated into existing software development models.

Sarah McKee
Senior Associate Director for Publishing, Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Sarah McKee is the senior associate director for publishing at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Prior to her arrival at Emory in 2017, she worked for fifteen years at the University of Georgia Press, serving most recently as managing editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia, an open access digital humanities reference work.

Joanna Mundy, PhD
Digital Projects Specialist, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Joanna Mundy earned her PhD in Roman art history and archaeology from Emory University in December 2018. As Digital Projects Specialist, she assists researchers with projects using mySQL databases, contributing to the design of databases to interact with geospatial data and network data as well as to work with network analysis software.

Michael Page
Geographer, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, and Lecturer of Geospatial Sciences & Technology, Department of Environmental Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Michael Page advised geospatial development of Mapping Senufo during its inception at Emory University in 2013. He also created maps for the exhibition “Senufo: Art and Identity in West Africa” and accompanying publication. He has contributed to the design of many digital projects in the humanities, including Atlanta Explorer and the American Expedition at Samothrace, Greece.

Sara Palmer
Digital Text Specialist, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Sara Palmer received an MA in Film and Media Studies from Emory University in 2012. At the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, she consults with researchers on creating online exhibits, designing databases, generating network visualizations, and performing textual markup and analysis.

Hannah Plank
Digital Image Specialist, Visual Resources Library, Art History, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Hannah Plank earned an MA in Art History from Texas Christian University in 2018 and an MLIS from Kent State University in 2024. At Emory, she manages digital image collections used for research and teaching in art history. She also supports digital projects in the Art History Department, including serving as project manager for Mapping Senufo.  

Christopher Sawula, PhD
Visual Resources Librarian, Art History, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Christopher Sawula received his PhD in History from Emory University in 2014. He has five years of experience supporting digital mapping projects in the humanities, including the Battle of Atlanta and Likenesses Within the Reach of All. As the Visual Resources Librarian in Emory’s Department of Art History, he assists faculty with data preservation, digital exhibitions, and projects focused on spatial art history.

Kayla Shipp, PhD
Digital Scholarship Specialist, Publishing, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Kayla Shipp consults on digital projects that look to shape the future of public humanities and publishing. She also designs and builds public-facing digital materials and scholarship, collaborating with cultural institutions, open access publications, and faculty to find innovative uses for digital methods and tools.

Megan Slemons
GIS Librarian, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Megan Slemons received an MS in Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013. At the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, she consults with researchers on using geospatial tools, finding and using data, and designing projects with spatial components.

Sam Vangheluwe
Professional Translator and Proofreader, SamSam Translations, Antwerp, Belgium

Sam Vangheluwe is a native of Belgium, a country with three official languages. He is passionate about art and language. As a student at the Universiteit Gent, he focused his studies on the artistry of sub-Saharan wood sculptors as well as the early-twentieth-century research of Pieter Jan Vandenhoute, recipient of the first PhD in African art history ever awarded in Belgium.

Mae Velloso-Lyons, PhD
Senior Associate Director of Publishing, Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Mae Velloso-Lyons works with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences to bring their plans for open and digitally enhanced monographs to fruition. She has a background in digital publishing and in project management for the digital humanities. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 2022.

CONSULTANTS

Erin Hecht, PhD
Web Designer, Cogwheel Productions, Atlanta, Georgia

Erin Hecht designs scholarly websites as a consultant to the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. She designed the test site for Mapping Senufo during the spring of 2015 and the revised site in 2016.

Mark Addison Smith
Associate Professor in Graphic Design, School of Design, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Mark Addison Smith holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Georgia State University and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). With his on-going, text-based archive, You Look Like The Right Type, Mark has been drawing snippets of overheard conversations every day since 2008. His work appears in permanent collections including the Brooklyn Museum Artists’ Books Collection, Center for Book Arts, Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, Kinsey Institute, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, MoMA Franklin Furnace, Smithsonian American Art and National Portrait Gallery Artists’ Book Collection, Tate Library, and Watson Library at The Met.

RESEARCH ASSISTANTS

Robyn Banton
Graduate Research Assistant (AY 2013-2014), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Emma de Jong
Graduate Research Assistant (Spring 2018, Fall 2018), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Zhongyi Gao
Undergraduate Research Assistant (AY 2014-2015), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Caitlin Glosser
Graduate Research Assistant (Summer 2016, AY 2016-2017, Summer 2017, AY 2017-2018, Summer 2018, AY 2018-2019), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Riley Horne
Undergraduate Research Assistant (AY 2017-2018), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Eleanor Hu
Undergraduate Research Assistant (Spring 2023), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Haley Jones
Graduate Research Assistant (AY 2017-2018), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Faith Kim
Undergraduate Research Assistant (Spring 2018, AY 2018-2019), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Xinyu Liu
Undergraduate Research Assistant (AY 2014-2015, Summer 2015, AY 2015-2016), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Alice Matthews
Graduate Research Assistant (Fall 2019, Summer 2020), Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Chelsy Monie
Graduate Research Assistant (Fall 2020), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Margaret Nagawa
Graduate Research Assistant (AY 2019-2020), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Rachel Patt
Graduate Research Assistant (AY 2018-2019), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Courtney Rawlings
Graduate Research Assistant (Spring 2016, Summer 2016, Spring 2019), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Jainee Shah
Undergraduate Research Assistant (Fall 2022, Spring 2023), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Matei T. Tichindelean
Graduate Research Assistant (Fall 2023, Spring 2024), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California

Elyse Toder
Undergraduate Research Assistant (Spring 2021), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

William Ulman
Graduate Research Assistant (Fall 2018), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Jacqueline Veliz
Undergraduate Research Assistant (Spring 2016, Summer 2016, AY 2016-2017), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Shiwei Wang
Undergraduate Research Assistant (Spring 2019), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Liu Yang
Undergraduate Research Assistant (AY 2014-2015, Summer 2015, AY 2015-2016), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

ADVISORY BOARD

Thomas Bassett, PhD
Professor, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Urbana-Champaign, Illinois

Suzanne Preston Blier, PhD
Allen Whitehill Clowes Chair of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies, Department of History of Art & Architecture and Department of African and African American Studies
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Jennifer Foley, PhD
Director of Education and Community Engagement
Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Buffalo, New York

Barbara Frank, PhD
Associate Professor, Art Department
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, New York

Barbara Hoffman, PhD
Professor, Department of Criminology, Anthropology, and Sociology
Cleveland State University
Cleveland, Ohio

Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, PhD
Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator
The Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York

* Bios and other details for Mapping Senufo team members are current as of individuals’ participation in the project but are not continually revised.