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The Bucher-Loewenstein Internship Award In Classics

Bucher-Loewenstein Interns for Cetamura Selected for 2022

The first recipients have been named for the Bucher-Loewenstein Museum Internships, recently endowed for Florida State University students by artist Suzanne Bucher in memory of her husband Dr. Robert Loewenstein. Dr. Loewenstein was an astronomer at the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, from 1974 to 2014, who had visited the site of Cetamura in 2015 along with his wife.  The internships will be used in connection with the Cetamura archaeological field and museum program and the Florida State University Study Abroad Program in Florence. 

The first recipients of the new awards are Classics students Holly Piper and Brittney Soukup. Holly is a first-year student in the Department of Classics Masters program majoring in Classical Archaeology.   She has been on archaeological excavations at The Ness of Brodgar, a Neolithic site in Scotland, and at a medieval cemetery in Dwasko, Poland, where she excavated what the team called “vampire” burials. Holly got her undergrad degree in Classics and Archaeology at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. She has had experience in planning exhibitions both virtual and real, and is eager to apply her skills to new techniques. Brittney is a rising senior majoring in Classical Archaeology and minoring in Museum Studies. In her many undergrad courses on art and archaeology she has acquired the background to prepare her for the work in Italy, which she will be visiting for the first time. She is very involved with athletics, having played flag football and soccer in high school and continuing now at FSU. She is excited to take part in activities that will help her train for a professional career in museum work.

In May Holly and Brittney will spend nearly a week in Florence visiting and critiquing museums and planning their own exhibition, tentatively scheduled for opening on June 1 in the Fine Arts Gallery of the FSU Florence Study Center. The preliminary title for the show is “Civitamura (Cetamura): Life in a Tuscan Castle between Florence and Siena.”  The exhibition will provide hypothetical reconstructions of a castle at Cetamura, which is believed to have been destroyed by the Florentines in the 12th century, and will examine the lives of inhabitants of the Tuscan countryside and cities in this period. They will create a Story Map of the exhibition, which will help in planning the show and will provide a permanent record of it after it has been closed and removed from the Study Center. 

In combination with their work in Florence, both students will also be a part of the Cetamura archaeological field school in the months of May and June, under excavation director Dr. Nancy de Grummond from the Classics Department at FSU.  The Bucher-Loewenstein scholarships, with a stipend of $9,000 each, covers their field school program at Cetamura as well as the additional week in Florence. 

Brittney and Holly with Dr, de Grummond, receiving training in how to do a Story Map, from Kelly Grove from Strozier Library at FSU