# HAA 2026 Senior Thesis Prize Winners May 26, 2026 ![from left to right: Charissa Shang, John Weaver, Catherine Mignone, Carrie Lambert Beatty](/sites/g/files/omnuum4426/files/2026-05/_NZF2735.jpg) *From left to right: Charissa Shang, John Weaver, Catherine Mignone, Carrie Lambert Beatty.* Congratulations to this year’s HAA prize winners: **Abramson Prize:** John Weaver, for his senior thesis *Worldly Heaven: Elephanta’s Polyvalent Program and Sacred Geography* - The Matthew Abramson '96 Prize is awarded by faculty vote to the one student of this department whose thesis has been determined as "Best Senior Thesis." - Advised by both Professors Jinah Kim and Martha Selby, this thesis reexamines the 6th century Hindu rock-cut cave temple of Elephanta Island, located in Mumbai, India and dedicated to the god, Shiva. Despite its fame, scholarship has yet to decode the theological, aesthetic, and social principles which informed its sculptural program. John blend together art historical, ecocritical, and philological inquiry to demonstrate that this site is both legible and a largely untapped mine of historical insight. He begins by reevaluating past scholarship, challenging incumbent beliefs about the site’s patronage, sectarian affiliation, and audience. Then, he outlines a reading of the sculptural program proceeding sequentially in the manner prescribed by South Asian religious praxis. Thereafter, Weaver examine the temple’s spatial symbolism, revealing another framework by which Elephanta can be read. Ultimately, he explore several readings and argue that there are multiple, carefully planned ways to understand the program. John conclude by considering the poly-valence of Elephanta against the socioeconomic context of the early medieval period, situating the site as an essential node of a vast, trans-regional network animated by maritime and inland trade routes. The environment itself is cleverly integrated into the site’s symbolism, with the temple serving to sacralize and protect the land and its travelers. **Ackerman Prize:** Charissa Shang, for her senior thesis *Healing Transit(Ions): From the Asklepieion to Park Street Station* - The James Sloss Ackerman Senior Thesis Prize in Architecture is awarded, by faculty vote, to a senior thesis of the highest merit on a topic in the history, theory, and/or design of architecture. - Charissa's thesis grew from an unusually deep and embodied engagement with the ancient world. Her formation at HAA began with an independent research tutorial under Professor Georganteli on the religious sanctuaries along the Via Egnatia — the 2,300-year-old Roman road connecting the Adriatic to the Hellespont — which trained her to read architecture and material culture as living evidence of how ancient societies encoded ritual, civic identity, and collective memory. That foundation was enriched by fieldwork at a Roman villa in Transylvania, a research internship at Dumbarton Oaks, and in-situ visits to every major Asklepieion in Greece and western Türkiye — Athens, Corinth, Epidauros, Kos, and Pergamon among them — supported by the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies. The thesis is a joint project in History of Art and Architecture and the Graduate School of Design supervised by Eurydice Georganteli and Megan Panzano, and its central argument, that the ancient Greek Asklepieia offer a powerful spatial and ritual model for reimagining contemporary public transit, brings archaeological close reading into direct conversation with architectural theory and urban design. Mapping three ancient typologies — the abaton, the theater, and the bath — onto the modern subway station, Charissa proposes that transit spaces can function as civic sanctuaries nurturing collective well-being rather than mere conduits of movement. The argument culminates in a design proposal for Boston's Park Street Station, one of the oldest subway stops in the United States: a model for how humanistic scholarship can directly inform urban planning and public health at a moment when cities urgently need exactly this kind of reimagination. **Fairman Prize**: Catherine Mignone, for her senior thesis *Sources Are Forgotten: Diamonds and Ethnic Solidarity.* - The Claire Fairman Prize is awarded to that thesis which is found, by faculty vote, to be most worthy, and of a topic focusing on modern art. - Catherine's Thesis grew from four years of sustained intellectual development at HAA. Her thinking was shaped in her first year by two courses — MEDVLSTD 250: At Cross Purposes: The Crusades in Material Culture, which trained her to read objects and images as primary evidence of how dominant powers construct identity, and HAA 73: Money Matters, which sharpened her understanding of how commodity systems encode political power and social hierarchy. Together, they gave Catherine both a method and a conviction: that the meaning of material things is never natural but always made. The thesis is a joint project in History of Art and Architecture and Government supervised by Professor Eurydice Georganteli and Noah Dasanaike, PhD candidate and Carl J. Friedrich Fellow in the Department of Government, and its central argument that that the meaning of a diamond's geographic origin has never been a natural fact but a political construction, remade by empires, corporate monopolies, and international regulatory bodies can only be made by treating visual culture as a primary source of equal standing to legal documents. From a 1476 miniature in the Codex of Predis to De Beers' mid-century advertising campaigns and the company's most recent Desert Diamonds collection, Catherine traces how the diamond's symbolic meaning as sacramental object, token of fidelity, and emblem of power was continuously constructed and reconstructed through visual culture long before international regulatory frameworks attempted to govern its origins. Art historical method becomes the indispensable analytical tool that makes the political science argument possible. The stakes are real and pressing: by establishing a template for the joint use of formal visual analysis and political theory to study commodity governance, Catherine's thesis speaks directly to critical mineral debates such as cobalt, lithium, and rare earths, that urgently demand exactly this kind of interdisciplinary scrutiny, and that matter profoundly to international policy and ethical sourcing at the UN level. See also:- [ Featured Undergraduate Alumni News ](/news-type/featured-undergraduate-news) - [ General News ](/news-terms/general-news) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)