The Haffenreffer Museum is pleased to announce the new Mellon Teaching Fellows for the 2016-2017 year as part of the Assemblages Program, Jeffrey Moser and Masha Ryskin.  The Assemblages project is a four-year pilot program that includes Faculty Teaching Fellows, Postgrad Photography Fellows, innovative courses, teaching workshops, and academic seminars. 

The RISD Teaching Fellow will be affiliated with a curatorial department in the Haffenreffer Museum and the Brown Teaching Fellow will be affiliated with a curatorial department in the RISD Museum, with the expectation of using the relevant collection and conducting research and teaching related to it and their area of expertise. The Fellows will receive one course teaching release (in consultation with their Department chairs) to enable them to develop courses and course components that make use of museum objects in their instructional pedagogy. Each Fellow will also provide a written report on the results of the fellowship. During the one-year appointment, Fellows are expected to engage audiences in the academic and museum communities and beyond, to both broaden and deepen access to the collections by sharing their work through articles, blog posts or other forms of dissemination. Fellows will collaborate with staff to select objects for their classroom use, lead a workshop, and participate with their students in an annual seminar.

Jeffrey Moser is a historian of East Asian art and culture who specializes in the artistic and intellectual history of China during the Song-Yuan era (tenth to fourteenth centuries AD). His research focuses on the ways in which sensory engagement with material things transformed historical approaches to the challenges of making, reasoning, and knowing. His interest in the catalytic potency of objects extends from the historical dimensions of his research to the contemporary challenges of university and museum education. Prior to joining the faculty at Brown in 2015, Moser taught at McGill University and Zhejiang University. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Nominal Things: Bronzes, Schemata, and Hermeneutics of Facture in Northern Song China. His research articles have appeared in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, and elsewhere. 

Masha Ryskin has taught in the Division of Experimental and Foundation Studies at RISD since 2010. She is printmaker, painter, and installation artist with a keen interest in music and anthropology. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally. A political refugee from the Soviet Union, she received a classical education in painting before earning a BFA in printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA at University of Michigan, where she became interested in textiles. Ryskin has participated in a number of artist residencies world-wide and is a recipient of numerous grants, including a Fulbright Fellowship to Oslo, Norway and the Rhode Island Fellowship in Printmaking and Drawing. Her project at Haffenreffer involves examining the textiles of the Andean region in order to assemble a teaching collection for drawing and design courses.  Specifically, she plans to look at the symbolism and role of patterns in Peruvian textiles.