Congratulations to JHU sophomore Ray Madaan, who has won a WGS summer fellowship to continue their research on Letters from Home (2004), a portfolio of prints by Zarina Hashmi in the Baltimore Museum of Art collection. Ray spent Fall 2025 working with Professor Rebecca Brown and BMA curator Dr. Leslie Cozzi in the upper-level seminar, Reply-All: Letter-Writing in Art and History, where Ray intensively researched and examined this 9-print portfolio featuring letters written in Urdu by Zarina’s sister but never sent, found by the artist after her sister’s death. The WGS fellowship will allow Ray to travel to New York, where Zarina was based, to research Zarina’s participation in activist feminist art groups that sought to foreground artists of color and immigrant artists, adding that element to the materials they have already gathered, and supporting the writing of an essay for publication. 

Photo caption: Ray Madaan (foreground in jacket) presents their research to BMA curators and staff in the Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Study Room as part of the JHU-BMA Reply-All seminar, December 2025.