COAC 2021 Speakers

COAC 2021: The Victor D. Brenner Sesquicentennial

September 17–18, 2021

Sponsored in association with the Resolute Americana Collection and the Stack Family.

Learn more and register at numismatics.org/coac2021.

Dr. Jesse Kraft is the Assistant Curator of American Numismatics at the American Numismatic Society. Kraft coordinated for the revived Coinage of the Americas Conference in 2021, which celebrates the Victor D. Brenner Sesquicentennial. Kraft specializes in numismatics of the Western Hemisphere, overseeing the North American, South American, and Caribbean material in the Society’s Collection, which includes his work as director of the ANS Medallic Art Company Project. A 2017 graduate of the Eric P. Newman Graduate Summer Seminar in Numismatics, Kraft has worked in museums and cultural institutions in various capacities.

Jonathan Kagan is a Trustee and Life Fellow of the American Numismatic Society. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Numismatic Society and the Society of Antiquaries. While trained in Classical numismatics at Harvard and Oxford, he has a lifelong interest in American coinage and is a collector of American medals.

Dr. Peter van Alfen is the Chief Curator of the American Numismatic Society. An economic historian with wide ranging interests, van Alfen researches monetary, fiscal, and trade systems around the ancient Mediterranean and Ancient Near East. He has published on a variety of topics including on Mycenaean administration, Athenian public finance and coinage, market regulations, Arabian monetization, and Late Roman amphoras. His interests also extend to European and US medallic art of the 15th–21st centuries and has curated live and digital exhibitions on these topics.  

Patrick McMahon is the Director of Renovations and Gallery Displays at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Originally a member of the Art of the Americas department, he joined the Exhibitions department in 2006 and continues to support numismatic inquiries for the American collections. An Associate Member of the American Numismatic Society, McMahon is an active collaborator on ANS projects related to medallic art and the work of Victor David Brenner. These include the Brenner 150 Exhibition, a digital recreation of the famous 1912 Hahlo Exhibition of Brenner’s work.

George Cuhaj, a Fellow of the American Numismatic Society, specializes in transit tokens and is a significant contributor to vecturist research at the ANS. Cuhaj began his association with the ANS as a part time photo clerk and continued his work as the Systems Operator until 1988, entering over 300,000 items into the historically important Pr1me database of the ANS Collection. From 1994-2015, he worked on the editorial staff at Krause Publications in Iola, Wisconsin where he edited the Standard Catalog of World Coins and Standard Catalog of World Paper Money series of publications.

Taylor Hartley is an art historian who resides in Brooklyn, NY. She is a third-year doctoral student in art history at The Graduate Center, CUNY, an Associate Member of the ANS, and regular host of ANS Long Table discussions. From 2018 to 2019, Hartley was the Collection Manager for the recent Medallic Art Company acquisition of the American Numismatic Society before beginning her PhD program. She specializes in twentieth-century sculpture of Europe and North America with particular interest in materiality and sculptural techniques.

Scott H. Miller is a Life Fellow of the American Numismatic Society, and a past president of the New York Numismatic Club. Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Miller attended Brooklyn College  and was employed in the federal civil service until his retirement in 2018. Miller began collecting coins at a young age and turned to medals in the early 70s, concentrating on those from the United States, France, and Great Britain, focused on 1876 to 1926. He has written articles for various ANS publications, as well as for the Medal Collectors of America Advisory and the Kent Collector.  In 2015, the ANS published his Medallic Art of the American Numismatic Society 1866-2014 as the second text in the Studies in Medallic Art series.  

Mark Schlepphorst, an Associate Member of the American Numismatic Society, is a transplant to the Boston area from Colorado where he works as a cyber security professional. He is passionate about his family, art medals, and rare succulents. Having met through a mutual admiration for Victor Brenner and Abraham Lincoln, he collaborated with Dick Johnson on several medallic projects, including works of medallic art attributed to Don Everhart, Joel Iskowitz, Hugo Greco, and Luigi Badia. He indulges in travel for research and collecting, and is looking forward to “more fluid” research access once the coronavirus is merely endemic.

Christopher Bach, an Associate Member of the American Numismatic Society, was formally trained and currently works in the field of architecture. Bach has had a life-long interest in and passion for sculpture, first experienced in his youth seeing the great monuments and public sculpture throughout New York City by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, Paul Manship, and other notable sculptors. This led to a concentration in research and collecting of Beaux-Arts medallic art (both French and American), for which Victor David Brenner’s work is fittingly included. 

Learn more and register at numismatics.org/coac2021.