Rhône River Cruise: Colors of Provence

Dr. Kate Lakin-Schultz is a master lecturer and the overall coordinator of the French language program at Boston University, where she teaches French language and culture courses as well as academic writing. She specializes in Francophone African literature and civilization and seeks to share the rich diversity of the Francophone world in her teaching, often focusing on the relationship between West Africa and France in her more advanced courses. Kate conducted archival research on Vichy period colonial periodicals in Dakar, Senegal, and her other interests include Pan-African movements of the 20th century, colonial history, French multiculturalism, and Paris through literature. She frequently presents on campus and at national conferences on best teaching practices and integrating culture in the world language classroom. She holds a PhD in French and Francophone literature and civilization from the University of Virginia and has spent summers in Lyon with the University of Virginia study abroad program and in Paris with Boston University. Kate has traveled extensively in France and the French Caribbean and spent a year on the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean.

Lisa Passaglia Bauman is an art historian of the Italian Renaissance and professor of art history at George Mason University in Virginia. A recipient of the university’s Teaching Excellence Award, she is consistently praised for her ability to turn students’ required course in the arts into one of their favorite experiences at the university. She has served as the academic director for George Mason’s semester abroad program in Florence, Italy, and at Oxford University in England, and she currently runs two study abroad programs for the university: Art and Memory in Rome and Florence, a summer program that explores the classical world of ancient Rome and its rebirth in the Renaissance; and From Roman to Parisian: Shaping the Urban Experience in France from Antiquity to the Modern Period, a winter course in urban design.

Before coming to George Mason, Lisa worked in the Department of Museum Education at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she developed and presented gallery walks and public lectures on the permanent collection and special exhibitions.  Her years of lecturing in front of the artwork have informed her teaching as she strives to engage her students more intimately with the object, its history, and its cultural context. 

Stéphanie Jeanjean is an art historian, curator, and translator who currently teaches art history at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and in the master's in contemporary art program at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York. She also works as an educator with the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA in New York. A native of France, Stéphanie was born in Langres, a culturally rich small town in the Champagne-Ardennes region of northeastern France, where she gained an early interest in the relationship between art, culture, and human activities throughout historical periods. She pursued an art history degree at the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon and completed her PhD at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Stéphanie has presented her research at museums, universities, and conferences worldwide, including Tate Britain in London, KAIST University in South Korea, Brown and Cornell Universities, MIT, and the Sorbonne in Paris. Her work on French militant video was published in Afterall Journal and reprinted in Hilary Robinson’s anthology, Feminism Art Theory. She has written numerous journal articles in English and French, as well as a chapter on sociological art for Exhibited Cinema: An Anthology. Her major curated project, WE DISSENT: Design of the Women's Movement in New York, presented work by more than 130 women artists and women’s collectives at 41 Cooper Gallery in New York. It was named one of "10 Under-the-Radar Art Shows" by The New York Times in 2018 and is accessible at www.wedissent.space.

Dr. Amanda Luyster is a distinguished medieval art historian and professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her work offers new perspectives on the cross-cultural nature of medieval visual culture, specifically the interactions between western Europe and the Islamic and Byzantine worlds and the movement of silk across broad global networks. 

After graduating from Amherst College summa cum laude and receiving her PhD from Harvard in 2003, she has gone on to secure prestigious fellowships and grants, including support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Paul Mellon Centre, the American Philosophical Society, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. She has been invited to speak at Harvard University, Cambridge University, the University of Oxford, London’s Institute of Historical Research, Yale University’s Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and other locations from Boston to China. Her work has led to international recognition, including election as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (FSA) in London and the Medieval Academy of America’s 2024 Monica H. Green Prize for Distinguished Medieval Research. 

Amanda is also dedicated to public-facing scholarship and media outreach. Her research has been featured in the London-based newspaper The Independent, The Times of Israel, and Harvard Magazine, and she has been interviewed on widely followed podcasts such as Gone Medieval (History Hit).  She has lived and worked in multiple European countries and loves travel and photography.

Bénédicte Boisseron was born and raised in France to a French mother and a French-Caribbean father from Guadeloupe. She earned her B.A. and M.A. in African American Literature from Paris Diderot University (Paris Cité Université), followed by a Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Currently, she serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS) at the University of Michigan, where she is also an affiliate faculty member in the Departments of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature. Her interdisciplinary work bridges French and Francophone Studies, global Black studies, and environmental humanities, explored through literary, historical, and cultural perspectives.

An award-winning author, she is currently developing several new projects, including a hybrid memoir and reflective work—supported by a 2022–2023 Guggenheim Fellowship—on the French Proustian experience of food through a multi-cultural lens; a short book on the everyday practice of living with dogs (under contract with Duke University Press); and Heirloom, a collaborative repeat photography project with Paris-based artist Lee Shulman that explores the repurposing of old memories. She teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in her areas of expertise and travels extensively for work and pleasure.

Sanjaya Thakur is professor and chair of classics at Colorado College and has held a number of national leadership positions in the field of classical studies. He  served as the director of the Classical Summer School at the American Academy in Rome from 2021 to 2023 and was the Elizabeth A. Whitehead Scholar at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens from 2022 to 2023. Sanjaya has published numerous articles, primarily on the literature and history of the age of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. He teaches a wide range of courses on Greek and Roman history, Latin literature, ancient athletics, and Greek and Roman art and archaeology. He also co-directed and organized an Associated Colleges of the Midwest faculty seminar entitled Mediterranean Trivium that was based in Italy.

Sanjaya earned two master's degrees in classical studies and classical art and archaeology as well as a PhD from the University of Michigan. An avid traveler, he has led many study tours through Greece, Italy, and Spain.

Ashley Elston is an art historian who specializes in the art and architecture of early modern Europe. After teaching at Berea College as associate professor of art history for over a decade, with particular emphasis on 15th-century Italy and 17th-century Northern Europe, she now manages an art collection based in the US and Italy. She discovered her love of Italian art and culture as an undergraduate working on a degree in history and medieval studies at St. Olaf College when she participated in a study abroad course in Rome. She went on to complete a master’s and PhD in art history at the University of Kansas. A Fulbright grant allowed her to live in Italy while conducting her doctoral research in churches, archives, and museums, and her work has also been supported by competitive grants from the Renaissance Society of America and the Southeastern College Art Conference.

Ashley’s research interests include the history of ritual art, the development of the art market in the Netherlands, and American exhibitions of Italian Renaissance art. She has published in art history journals and academic volumes, and co-edited a book titled Hybridity in Early Modern Art.

Writer and lecturer Adam Tanner spent many years as a foreign correspondent for Reuters news agency, including as Balkans bureau chief; San Francisco bureau chief; and correspondent in Germany, Moscow, and Washington D.C. He has long studied colonialism, economic engagement, and globalization, with a particular interest in the enduring impact of Europe on Asia, Latin America, and Africa. He has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Bloomberg TV, NPR, and the BBC, and written for publications such as Scientific America, Forbes, Fortune, Time, and Frommer’s guidebooks.  

Adam was a fellow and associate at Harvard University from 2011-26, initially at the Nieman Foundation, then the Institution of Quantitative Social Science, and most recently, the Shorenstein Center Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government.  He has written two books on privacy and commerce: Our Bodies, Our Data and What Stays in Vegas.

Rod Phillips teaches history at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he is a specialist in the history of France and the history of wine.  He is the author of many books on social and cultural history and wine, including French Wine: A History and 9000 Years of Wine: A World History.

Rod grew up in New Zealand and has long been fascinated by wine, reading so much about it at an early age that he became a wine steward for a local restaurant while still in high school. He has a particular appreciation of France and French wines, and travels there several times each year to do historical research or to visit wine regions.

His research about wine has brought him to wine regions all over the world, and he has written extensively for the wine media, including Guildsomm in the US and the World of Fine Wine in the United Kingdom. Rod has also judged in wine competitions in France, Italy, Canada, the U.S., and Chile, and other countries.  He has written the scripts for three TED-Ed videos, and since 2019, he has given an annual lecture on wine in art at the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego.

Beyond wine, Rod’s interests as a historian include food and drink and animals.

Dr. Paul B. Sturtevant has been enthralled with the Middle Ages since he began building balsa wood castles for his toy knights when he was eight years old. Fast-forwarding just a little, he has now become an expert on the contemporary public’s understanding of the Middle Ages. In the intervening years, after a brief career as an actor, he moved to the United Kingdom where he earned his master’s and his Ph.D. from the Universities of York and Leeds, respectively. He then taught for universities in the United Kingdom, the U.S., and Portugal on subjects as diverse as medieval history, film theory, and museum studies.

Paul has published widely on the intersection of contemporary issues and the medieval past both in academic books and also public venues like the Washington Post and BBC News. He is particularly fond of two of his stories, one in which he successfully debunked a pernicious ghost story about one of his ancestors, and another on the history of American barbecue. He founded and ran an award-winning medieval history online magazine called The Public Medievalist, and worked for a decade for the Smithsonian Institution as an audience research specialist. Paul now lives with his partner in Portugal, where they are developing cutting-edge, historical study abroad-style experiences for visitors to Europe.