Madeline Díaz

Madeline Díaz has expertise in art history and museum studies and more than 15 years of experience creating and leading programs for museums and cultural institutions. She has worked for The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Cloisters, the Frick Collection, the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and the Smithsonian Latino Center for which she currently serves as consultant. She develops and leads education programs for several French cultural institutions, including the Grand Palais, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, and the Mona Bismarck American Center. She also teaches museum education and cultural mediation at the University of Versailles. Madeline has traveled extensively through Spain, Italy, and France and has a passion for art, photography, languages and flamenco. Madeline holds a BA from Brown University and an MA from Columbia University. 

Cassandra Potts Hannahs

Cassandra Potts Hannahs is a historian with special expertise in Celtic, Viking, and Anglo-Norman studies. She has enjoyed traveling with Smithsonian Journeys on more than 50 tours and cruises, sharing her passion and knowledge of Great Britain, France, and Ireland.

With a Ph.D. in medieval history, she was a tenured professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she taught courses on a wide range of subjects, from ancient history through the Reformation.  A Fulbright scholar and recipient of several grants, she has also spent considerable time living in France pursuing research.  Her publications include a book exploring the Viking settlement of Normandy in northern France during the 10th and 11th centuries, and the revival of monasticism that took place as the new rulers encouraged monks to return to the region after the Viking raids. 

In her research and lectures, Cassandra explores the cultural and political exchanges that have historically linked Britain, France, Ireland, and Scandinavia. She looks forward to sharing her love and knowledge of these lands, their history, music, and literature, with Smithsonian Journeys travelers.

Stephen Clancy

Stephen Clancy is an art historian with special expertise in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance art and architecture. A popular Smithsonian Journeys Expert, he has led more than 15 tours and cruises through the Mediterranean region and northern Europe.

Stephen Clancy recently retired as Professor of Art History at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, where he taught for twenty-seven years.  After receiving his Ph.D from Cornell University, Stephen taught the history of Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance art and architecture, as well as courses on visual persuasion and the rhetoric of art.  His research career began with a focus on fifteenth-century French and Flemish illuminated manuscripts, specifically with works connected to the artists Jean Fouquet (about whom he has written a book, a book chapter, and several articles) and Simon Marmion (for which he received a 1995-96 Fulbright Scholarship in Brussels, Belgium).  Stephen is a recipient of grants from the Hewlett and Keck foundations. 

Stephen worked with a team of students and faculty from the University of Melbourne in Australia to investigate how technology can open up new avenues for understanding the art and architecture of the distant past, in a project entitled “Virtual Chartres Cathedral.” More recently he was a Visiting Fellow at the Australia National University in Canberra, investigating the roles that images play in shaping cultural identity, in a project entitled “Visualizing the Self and Others: Muslims, Jews, and Christians in Medieval Iberia.”

Stephen’s latest research project has seen him develop a course entitled “Jewish Imagery and Images of Jews,” and has taken him to a number of medieval Jewish cultural sites in Spain, Germany, and France, where the past is being revived and reinvented in interesting and sometimes controversial ways. The academic pursuit he has enjoyed above all others is teaching and sharing his knowledge of art and architecture. He has served as a lecturer on numerous tours over the past twenty-two years in the Mediterranean and in northern Europe, from Scandinavia to Russia.