Biography
Rae Di Cicco is a PhD candidate in the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. She specializes in the modern art, design, and cultural history of Central Europe. Her work investigates issues of identity and politics faced in the region during the transition from imperial to national organization after World War I. Her master’s thesis, “Erika Giovanna Klien and Cosmopolitan Imagination in Post-Habsburg Austria,” explored the incorporation of signifiers of national artistic styles into Kineticist artist Erika Giovanna Klien’s artistic production as a kind of cosmopolitan imagination, visualizing – literally making visual – hybrid and shifting identity and multiple belonging. Her dissertation will expand on the work begun in her master’s on Klien and the Vienna-based modernist movement she was apart of in the 1920s, Kinetismus.
Education Details
MA Paper: “Erika Giovanna Klien and Cosmopolitan Imagination in Post-Habsburg Austria”
Honors Theses: “Victory and Validation: Noble and Ignoble Suicide on the Column of Trajan” “The Two Faces of Absinthe in Late Nineteenth – Early Twentieth Century Art”
Selected Awards
DAAD Intensivsprachkursstipendium (Intensive Language Course Grant to study at the Goethe Institut Freiburg), 2015
Dean’s Summer Research Travel Grant, University of Pittsburgh, 2015
Summer Diversity Research Grant, University of Pittsburgh, 2015
Friends of the Frick Fine Arts Travel Grant, University of Pittsburgh, 2014
K. Leroy Irvis Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh, 2013-2014
Selected Conferences
“From Sexy to Sexless: The Kineticist (Re)Vision of Bodies in Art” Doing the Body in the 21st Century: Bodies that Bend Panel, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Conference, University of Pittsburgh, April 2016
“Kineticism as Cosmopolitan Practice” Ohio University Art History Graduate Students Symposium, Ohio University, Athens, OH, April 2015
“Erika in Amerika: Picturing the Lost Heimat and National Identifications Abroad” Cultural Dis/Union: In/Outside (National) Culture Panel, Cultural Studies Annual Common Seminar Colloquium, University of Pittsburgh, April 2014