Each year, the Icon Museum and Study Center hosts interns who contribute their talents to the organization while gaining professional skills. Past interns have worked on substantial projects such as curating small exhibitions, creating marketing material, planning programs, and designing products for the Museum Shop. Tasks vary depending on Museum needs and students’ interests. One of the benefits of being at a small organization is that interns can observe all staff and departments while specializing in one particular area. The Museum currently offers in-person, virtual, and hybrid internships.
All 2024 internships are currently filled.
Current Study Center Interns
Caleb Barrett, Practicum Internship in Public Humanities
Caleb is a rising sophomore Public History Major at Endicott College from Sterling, MA. His Public History degree program primarily focuses on the analysis of both academic research and history itself to make information more accessible to the public, particularly through exhibits and archival work. He is most interested in the aspect of public history that prioritizes interpretation of artifacts and primary source documentation to create original exhibits for the public.
As a Public Humanities intern at The Icon Museum and Study Center, Caleb is transcribing the notebooks and lectures of Shirley Kontos, a late twentieth-century Greek icon painter from Chicago.
Kyriaki Giannouli, The John Barns Research Internship
Kyriaki is a doctoral candidate in Byzantine History at the University of Ioannina and a professional painting conservator. Her research, supervised by Dr. Christos Stavrakos, Full Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Ioannina and Secretary General of the AIEB, examines the significance of Greek landscapes in the travelogues of Western pilgrims to the Holy Land between the 12th and 17th centuries. She is a specialist in Byzantine icons, frescoes, coins, and seals with experience in producing conservation reports and in managing databases. During her three-month remote graduate fellowship at the Index of Medieval Art (January-April 2024) at Princeton University, she collaborated with Dr. Maria Alessia Rossi, Art History Specialist at the Index of Medieval Art, and Julia Gearhart, Director of Visual Resources in the Department of Art and Archaeology. She undertook tasks such as examining legacy records, studying bibliographies and artifact conditions (including enamel, metalwork, wood, sculpture, and mosaic), updating metadata, and identifying and incorporating new color images into online databases.
As the John Barns Research intern at The Icon Museum and Study Center Kyriaki is focused on expanding knowledge around the collection of Greek icons, including panels from 16th- and 17th-century Veneto-Cretan workshops.
Michael O’Connell, The Raoul and Mary Smith Research Internship
Michael earned a B.A. at Haverford College in 2024 with a double major in Russian and History. At Haverford Michael participated in the campus biking club and in student government. Michael’s summer project at The Icon Museum and Study Center as the Raoul and Mary Smith Research intern builds on his recently completed thesis, which followed the generational arc of Russian Orthodox immigrants in Philadelphia in the 20th century. He is interested in how the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches responded to issues of ethnic and national identity, especially among emigrants who left villages in the Carpathian Mountains and along the Dniester River. The national and religious identity of this region and its people is politically and historically contentious; he thus hopes to use icons and other religious items brought and/or made by immigrants to examine the historical questions they raise in the United States.
His research interests include immigration, immigrant societies and organizations, the Russian émigré community and press, and ethnicity in the United States including various historiographic dimensions. He hopes to continue his education in graduate school with plans to teach Russian as a foreign language to adults and professionals.