Graduate Student Emily Cornish is writing her thesis on the place of Oceanic tattoo in Lisa Reihana’s In Pursuit of Venus [infected] and Joseph Dufour et Cie’s Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique under the supervision of Matthew Rarey and Associate Professor Jennifer Johung. Thanks to the generous contributions of the Jeffery R. Hayes Award and the Graduate Student Travel Award she was able to attend and present a draft of  her thesis at the annual Australian and New Zealand Studies Association of North America conference in Winter Park Florida this past February.

Emily reports, “Additionally, I travelled to the Historic Deerfield Museum in Deerfield Massachusetts to view this decorative wallpaper in person during the week of March 13^th. The domestic sphere is crucial to understanding many of the objectives of Les Sauvages, its intended audience and the manner in which the wallpaper is poised to physically impact viewers.  So while Les Sauvages can found in number of museum institutions worldwide, it was particularly important to me to go and view the one in the Deerfield collection, because the wallpaper is installed in the Stebbins House at this museum. The staff at Deerfield graciously allowed me to tour the museum off-season when they are normally closed to the public, in addition to providing me with high-resolution photographs of the wallpaper and a transcript of the guidebook that accompanied it. I am grateful for these experiences and the tremendous impact they have had on my research!”