Brittany Forniotis ’15
PhD Candidate at Duke University
Durham, NC
WFU Class of 2015
Double Major in Art History with Honors and History with Honors
Minor in Medieval Studies
Riley Phillips: What was your Honors in Art History research project at Wake?
Brittany Forniotis: For my honors project, I looked at two hospitals in the Mediterranean (one in Milan, and one in Istanbul) that speak to a larger architectural moment in hospital construction, art, and hospital design in the fifteenth century. I came to this topic after meeting with faculty and being referred to major books in art history. I knew I was interested in architecture, but at the time, I wasn’t sure what area or time in the medieval period until I read a book about Milan (that was actually written by Florence and the Machine’s mom!—anyway). So, I read this book, and [the author] talks about the hospital and presents it as a mystery where the architect goes missing. He’s supposed to be going to Istanbul, but they never hear from him again. When reading that, I thought, “oh, that’s strange, because in Istanbul in this other book, they also have a hospital with the same architectural principles. Of course, this is like an undergraduate’s like Pipe Dream, right? Now, I’m not sure if any of this is valid now, as a doctoral student, but at the time, I was really excited to look at this moment of buildings, particularly hospitals, that use bilateral symmetry and are really tightly organized—these types of buildings that don’t just happen organically. They’re tightly designed.
The whole Honors process was an amazing experience, and I was so enthused about the project that I picked it back up as a graduate student at Duke!
RP: That’s fascinating! I’d be really interested to see what kind of connection or overlap there is in these trends to the hospital systems in the States now, especially North Carolina or Winston-Salem, given the impact of Atrium and Wake Forest Baptist Health here.
BF: Yeah! I did a project at Duke on the Duke Hospital looking at this moment where the hospital architecture changes in the early twentieth century, from about 1920 – 1960, where there’s a huge shift, and I’m sure Wake Forest hospitals experience similar changes because the Duke Hospital was built as a response to the Wake Forest medical program.
RP: Please walk me through your path from graduation day to where you our now in your PhD program.
BF: I graduated in 2015, and then I was awarded the stArt Fellowship! During that year, I applied to graduate school for the first time and did it like an absolute fool, like an idiot. I didn’t ask for help, I didn’t have anyone read over my essay, I didn’t contact any faculty members. If I had asked for help, I would have known that you have to ask for a faculty member to sponsor you or be your mentor. But I didn’t do that, so I got rejected across the board.
Fortunately, I figured out early enough that graduate school wasn’t going to work out at this point, so I knew I needed to apply for jobs. I really wanted to move in with my boyfriend, much to everyone’s dismay, and he lived in Chapel Hill, so I applied for jobs in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. I looked at mostly academic administration work. I learned a lot about this kind of work during my stArt fellowship, and it was really intriguing to me. I’ve always liked being part of something that makes an institution work. I love playing support. I always say this in video games, too, and in Dungeons and Dragons, I love being like the healer. I love making the connections so that people can do better work. Those are the kinds of jobs I was looking for.
Well, then my boyfriend got hit by a car.
He’s totally fine now, but this really changed my career path. I was courting multiple jobs at NC State, Duke, and UNC, but when my boyfriend got hit by this car, I didn’t have time to go to all these interviews because I was taking care of him.
I had a job offer from UNC and I had a week to decide, and I was taking care of my boyfriend, so I said, I’ll just take it. The position was Business Services Coordinator, and it’s essentially broad admin support in a department, working underneath the department manager. And it was so unglamorous, but ostensibly I was learning how to run a department, so that I could be like a department manager. I would be running finance, purchasing, HR—I was learning how to do all those things, and those are the most valuable skills that I’ve learned, because in my career now I constantly return to that time being an administrative assistant. But I also had to do the unglamorous tasks of changing the printer ink and running around for my boss.
At that point I realized “you need to ask people for help. You’re not the only one who helps people.” So, I reached out to my professors at Wake Forest for help applying to graduate schools. So, I applied again, and I got into the MA in Art History at UNC, which that was great for me because I was already working there. As a student, I worked full time for the first year of my masters, and I would school full time. What that looked like was like going to the office from nine to five, only taking night classes for a year, which was difficult.
My dad, immigrated to this country in the seventies from Greece. It’s a hard life in Greece; people there don’t have a lot of the financial stability that other European countries do, even today, and when my dad immigrated, he didn’t speak English. He had been a mechanic by trade, and he opened his own shop eventually, but he was working like three to four jobs. My mom is from middle of country, she’s from Indiana, and she got her GED after dropping out of high school in eleventh grade, and eventually got an Associate’s degree and became a nurse. But I didn’t have this family legacy where you go to college, and my family couldn’t financially support my working in the arts, so I couldn’t give up my full-time job while pursuing this Master’s degree that year.
The second year of my Master’s program, I had to write my thesis, which is a serious endeavor, and simultaneously I was applying to doctoral programs. Again, I asked for help, both from my WFU faculty and UNC faculty. I applied to programs all over the country and eventually decided on Duke.
I started at Duke in 2019, and everything was going great (in the horrible chaotic way that new things are great). I was joining research labs and taking Arabic for the first time, and by spring of 2020, I’m on Spring Break, doing research in an archive lab that I’m in, and the next day, the students are told that the university is shutting down. It was a huge wrench, like it was for everyone. I did Zoom university for the next year and a half. My advisor and my close colleagues and I had all these classes plan for our dissertations, and we basically had to set up like guerrilla libraries, where we would check out the books and hide them in the department, and then, we could scan them illicitly so that we could read these books, because we can’t put anything on course reserves because no one can go to the library.
When we’re back up and in person after virtual schooling, I went through all of my PhD milestones. You have to pass comprehensive exams or qualifying exams. To prepare, you have to devise a reading list of however-many books. For me, it was a total of about 150 books and articles, and you have to read all of them and know what they say, and then you spend two grueling days answering essay questions basically about these lists. After passing those, you’re able to write your dissertation. So I’m doing that, and at the same time, I’m applying for these major grants, which is like applying for college all over again, and it’s very selective. It’s grueling. I don’t think that I would have been able to like juggle all of these things had I not done the admin assistant job at UNC and the stArt Fellowship.
And now, I’m not just a doctoral student, I was a teaching assistant and I chose to be part of student government, and I chose to work as an editorial assistant at a major journal (Gesta, a premier journal for medieval Art). I have all of these side hustles, which you kind of have to do to further your career, but also they’re great for networking to help you learn who the major players are in your in your field.
In the spring, I’ll be teaching um as an instructor of record for the first time. I’ll be teaching the topic of Renaissance architecture because I am an architectural historian. My field of research interest really ranges from late antiquity to enlightenment, and I’ll be teaching it from a global perspective. We’re going to talk about Italy, of course, and we’re going to talk about France, but I received such an excellent education at Wake Forest that I understand that the world is connected, and these people were talking. So we’re also going to talk about what’s happening in Egypt., what’s happening in modern day Iran, and what’s happening in India at that time.
RP: Can you discuss a project that you’ve been able to work on as a result of these connections?
BF: I’ve been part of a lot of research projects that the Faculty and Art History Department have put on. One of them was about the architecture of Duke University, one is about historical maps… I have also worked really closely with the Islamicist in the Religious Studies department at Duke. She did a project in an exhibit that’s up now about the first mosque in Durham. It’s community which is a primarily black community in Durham, and they have this really incredible story of creating their own space in the community, really weathering some dark times in Durham and being a good support network for each other, as well as bringing their faith to the community. That exhibition was really fun for me to work on because I don’t get to work with the community that often anymore since my research is in medieval and early modern periods. I missed that about my stArt fellowship I really like working with the classes and community members who would come in to see the exhibit.
RP: Do you have any advice on how to approach networking and reaching out to possible mentors?
BF: When I was applying to graduate school because I was terrified to reach out to these scholars that I wanted to work with. It’s terrifying because you feel kind of like you’re not good enough, or like they’re going to dismiss you, but what I found often is that people love being asked about themselves. I always tell students who are interested in going to graduate school to just reach out for an informational interview, and it doesn’t have to be anything more than that. And if they say no, that’s okay, because there are so many other people that you could probably ask. And if they say yes, and it’s a great conversation, then you’ve just made possibly a friend, definitely a colleague, or someone who you can reach out to again. People need people, so you might think you have nothing to offer to the situation, but one day you will.
It’s just one where you have to sort of bite the bullet and do it, because thirty minutes of someone’s time can totally change your life.
RP: What does it look like to ask for help from someone in the graduate school application process? Literally speaking, what is the email that you send?
BF: So you have to do your research first, right? You have to figure out, what are we interested in? Where do I want to go? And who do I want to work with? So you to have a target mentor. Then, you need to look and see where that mentor went to school and where they’ve worked and what kind of research they do, because it’s a small world, you know. It’s a small world in every field, so it’s not shocking, but they probably know your professors on some level.
So the email you can send is something like this: “I’m so inspired to go to graduate school. Can you talk to me about going to graduate school? I am new to this process like I’d love to learn about your experience.” And I did this—I sat down with every single art history faculty member and most of the staff, and said “Tell me about your life journey.” It takes up a lot of time, but I learned a lot from it. So, after you talk and you get their life experience, a lot of times, they’ll be happy to support you. So then you send the second email, where you say, “Well, here’s where I want to go. I think you might know ‘so-and-so’—could you help me with approaching them?”
Then, you’ll need to send a clear and concise email with all the information upfront—why you’re interested in the program, what you want to research, and how that applies to them and their work.
When applying to the program, you’ll need a letter of recommendation. I’m asking anyone and everyone for a letter of recommendation. And I know it’s scary, but this is a part of their job[…] to support you. They want to do it, and they get paid to do it. Obviously, this is why you know you have these people, and every time it feels like ripping a band-aid off, it is totally acceptable to ask people for as many letters of recommendation as you need.
Your Wake Forest faculty are always really good about that too, and supportive and Wake alums, too, are really good resources for that. They want to help.
RP: What and where is next for you? Post-grad plans?
BF: My post-grad plans are completely a mystery to me, and actually for the first time in my life, I’m completely comfortable with that. Like any good graduate student, I would love to be a faculty member, but the truth of the matter is, there are not that many faculty jobs, particularly in the United States and medieval art history or early modern art. The requirements for getting one of those jobs are very high. You have to have a good publication record, a good teaching record, a good Grant record, and I’m working on it, and I feel like I’ve hit a lot of the milestones that I wanted to in my career; but, I’m cognizant of the fact that for every one of me, there’s probably five better people, and I will do my best to try to get one of these coveted jobs, but the landscape is changing, and they’re just not necessarily available.
So, I’m really actually turning my realistic focus to academic administration, or moving to industry and more of a project management or operations management vein. I like being able to have the vision of everything that’s happening and help to plug people into other ways that things work.
So, it would be cool to be a professor, that’s part of what I like about being in academia. It gives you a lot of opportunities to have your project, but also help other people and be invested in other people’s work, but realistically, I’m going to be applying for industry and academic administration jobs.