Lauren Caskey, a PhD student in History of Art, was recently awarded the Presidential Fellowship from the Graduate School at Ohio State.  This is the most prestigious award given by the graduate school, and funds a full calendar year of dissertation writing and research, which Lauren will use to compete her dissertation, “Communities of Color: The Paintings of Alma Thomas,” which examines the work of Thomas, particularly the abstract compositions she produced between 1960 and 1978, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement and the contentious debates within the art world itself around different forms of representation. Congratulations to Lauren on this great achievement!