Elisa Germán is a doctoral candidate at Boston University specializing in modern and contemporary art. Her dissertation, entitled: “The Creative State: The Calcografía Nacional and its Impact on Printmaking in Madrid after the Spanish Civil War, 1939-1959,” explores the institutional and artistic networks available to artist-printmakers who remained in Spain amid the post-WWII and the Cold War eras. She expects to defend her dissertation in the Spring 2019. Professionally, she has held positions in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the former W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, and currently serves as an officer for the Association of Print Scholars. Elisa holds a B.A. from Amherst College and an M.A. from Boston University.
Dr. Lauren Fogle is a medieval historian and writer of historical fiction. She is a professor at UMass Lowell where she created a course entitled “Art and the Nazis” for the Honors College. She also teaches classes in her primary field, which is medieval European history. Her first novel, The Altarpiece, was published in 2013 under the name Lauren Fogle Boyd and focused on Nazi art looting during World War II. She is currently working on a sequel.
A Boston native, Stephen Kurkjian spent nearly 40 years as an editor and reporter for The Boston Globe before retiring in 2007. During his career, he shared in three Pulitzer Prizes and won more than 20 regional and national reporting awards.
Educated in the Boston public schools, Kurkjian graduated from Boston Latin School in 1962. He majored in English Literature at Boston University and earned his law degree from Suffolk University Law School in 1970.
Kurkjian was a founding member of The Globe’s investigative Spotlight Team, and its editor for 1979-1986. In 1986, he was named chief of The Globe‘s Washington Bureau and for six years oversaw the work of the paper’s 10 reporters in Washington. Returning to Boston in the early 1990s, he completed numerous investigative projects from The Globe newsroom including the clergy abuse scandal inside the Boston Archdiocese and the devastating fire at a Rhode Island nightclub that took the lives of 100 people.
His 2005 article of the theft of 13 pieces of artwork from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is regarded as the most complete account of the still-unsolved crime. His book, MASTER THIEVES: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s Greatest Art Heist, was published to critical acclaim in 2015. Soon after publication, the book was optioned by Sony/TriStar pictures who recently announced that it had contracted with firm director Jose Padilha to make it into a Hollywood movie.