Renovation projects to impact services at multiple library locations beginning May 11. More information.
UK Libraries is proud to recognize seniors Natalie Lewis and Siena Pilati with the 2026 UK Libraries Award for Undergraduate Research.
The annual prize celebrates exceptional and original undergraduate scholarship and is awarded to students whose research makes substantive and creative use of UK Libraries’ collections, services, and resources.
Natalie Lewis, a senior pursuing dual degrees in Art Studio and Art History, was awarded for her paper, “Conservation Considerations: The USSR Impact on Provenance, Conservation, and Display of Two Orthodox Russian Icons.”
For an assignment in Dr. Sophia Maxine Farmer's Art History course Art & Authenticity, Lewis was tasked with finding an object with questionable provenance. She stumbled upon a purportedly 16th-century Russian icon in the UK Art Museum's collections and was immediately struck by its strangeness.
“I knew right away: it's not supposed to look like that. The colors were off, the line work was off, and there were these horrible white highlights on it,” she said.
The information that the museum had on the icon was scant. The accession file labeled the icon as a late 16th-century piece, but someone else had written in pencil arguing for the late 17th century. The only other information included the original place of purchase (Moscow) and the date it had arrived at the museum.
Fleshing out the rest of the details became the subject of Lewis's year-long capstone project. The first step involved background work on the politics of art and religion in the early USSR. “The Soviet government was stealing art from churches and essentially thrift-flipping icons for profit,” Lewis said. “You had all these icons coming to the US and spreading around Europe, some that had been heavily retouched to look older, others that were outright fakes. The Soviets sponsored traveling exhibitions that included both real and fake icons, and they'd try to sell the fake ones.”
Other details required clever sleuthing using UK Libraries databases. Lewis knew that the original purchaser, Harold Denny, had been a New York Times correspondent. “I was able to use the Libraries' New York Time digital subscription to follow Denny's articles and pin down when he would have been in Moscow, which was from 1936 to 1941.”
Denny's wife was an Art History professor at UK, and following her death the icon was donated to the Art Museum in her name. Lewis used the Libraries' collection of Board of Trustees minutes to track down the donation record. “It was there that I could trace a definitive path for the icon from Moscow to New York to Lexington, where it hung above the Denny's fireplace for three years,” she said.
Lewis was also helped by art history articles she found on JSTOR and a particularly useful book from the Little Fine Arts & Design Library on Novgorod icons. “This book was essential,” said Lewis. “From the particular color palette and composition I was able to pinpoint that the icon was made in the style of the 16th century Novgorod School.”
But the final question of authenticity required some serious science. Lewis brought the icon to the EduceLab, where Dr. Michael Detisch assisted in scanning the piece using X-ray Fluorescence. This procedure excites the electrons of different elements and provides the elemental composition of the object. “It was there that we discovered an odd amount of titanium,” Lewis explained. “But titanium white was not produced until 1921.”
So, Lewis concluded, while the backing of the icon is original, the image was heavily altered sometime in the 20-year window between the invention of titanium white and the last known date of Denny’s stay in Moscow before it found its unlikely way to a Lexington mantle.
Lewis was mentored throughout the project by Farmer, Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Studies, and Dr. Alice Christ, Associate Professor of Art History & Visual Studies, who served as her faculty mentor during her capstone course.
“I am so proud of all she has accomplished with this project and at UK,” said Farmer. “Even as her project was in its early stages, I was impressed by Natalie's initiative and research acumen. As she expanded her project, she reached out of her own accord to professionals within UK and other institutions, connecting her library research to scientific analyses and the work of other scholars. Over the course of this academic year, Natalie has shared her research on this project in a variety of venues including the UK Undergraduate Art History & Visual Studies Research Symposium, the 17th Annual Dr. Jonathan Riess Undergraduate Art History Colloquium, and the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR). I know she will go on to do great things.”
“Natalie put a lot of time and hard work into developing this project and also into presenting it to different audiences,” said Christ. “We are delighted to have a student with such talent, energy and ambition. After all, her successes shed glory also on her mentors.”
Lewis will be working this summer as an Andrew W. Mellon Summer Intern at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in the Costume and Textiles Department. She intends to pursue a career in textile conservation.
Siena Pilati, a senior Public Policy major was awarded for her paper, “Striking a Balance: Consolidating and Innovating U.S. Federal Government Data Management while Preserving the Privacy and Trust of Americans.”
For her senior capstone project, Pilati took on a topic enormous in scale, pervasive in the cultural imagination, but often arcane in its particulars: the way federal agencies use, store, and share our personal data.
“There is a great deal of concern about who has our data, what kinds of data are public or private, and how our data is being shared,” said Pilati, “but conversations about how better to manage all of this data generally don't start until something bad happens: a big data breach, for example. But if we start talking about it now we can be much more proactive.”
Personal data – from medical history and education records to property ownership and income – is essential to the provisioning of government services. But federal data tends to be siloed within government agencies as a result of the Privacy Act of 1974 and other legislation. These laws prevent agencies from sharing data between themselves and shifts the administrative burden of accessing government services onto citizens.
“If the IRS could share data with the Department of Education, for example, we wouldn't have to fill out FAFSA forms every year," said Pilati. "The government could work much better for us if we thoughtfully improved the way that we handle individuals' data.”
Many federal data management systems are outdated, and recent attempts at modernization have been more destructive than constructive, resulting in the mishandling, exposure, or outright sale of sensitive personal information. Matters are further complicated by the many ways that individual states manage and share data with the federal government.
Pilati's project waded through the baroque, sprawling systems of federal data management and culminated in a policy brief that suggests ways to balance modernization and efficiency with careful attention to privacy, security, and trust. At the top of her recommendations are forward-looking updates to the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act (CIPSEA), enacted in 2002, and the addition of dedicated data stewards to federal agencies.
“Legislation always lags behind the facts on the ground,” she said. “In an arena that moves as fast as technology does, we can’t afford to have such outdated laws and regulations.”
Pilati’s research relied on UK Libraries' extensive collections of government documents. “Through the Libraries, I was able to access policy and legislation, legal documents, recommendations from committees and groups, and court cases, which helped me piece together these rules, discover the processes by which they were made, and determine where policy-makers can intervene.”
Pilati was especially aided by Business, Economics, & Government Information Librarian Jennifer Horne, who visited with all of the Martin School capstone students at the beginning of the year. “Her Public Policy Research Guide was immensely useful,” said Pilati. “It laid out and organized all of the databases that I needed, and it was so helpful to have all of those very specific resources together in one place.”
Pilati also relied on the Libraries' many newspaper databases while putting together a poster presentation for her project. The poster uses headlines from data-centric stories to visually highlight the ways sensitive personal information is consistently mishandled by the institutions charged to safeguard it.
“The research process for this policy brief was extremely eye-opening,” said Pilati. “I was so grateful to have the robustness of UK Libraries resources available to me as I attempted to reconcile US federal policy with current events. I hope the findings of this project bring light to a topic that is not often discussed until it’s too late, and that we can have more proactive conversations between both citizens and our government about data management in the future.”
Pilati was mentored throughout her project by Dr. Cory Curl, Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Martin School of Public Policy & Administration.
“Siena’s capstone project on federal data policy and practice demonstrates her exceptional creativity and problem-solving capacity. It also displays her deep commitment to public service,” said Curl. “Siena embraced the power of evidence-based policymaking early on. She completed the Martin School's PPL 401 Data and Evidence in Public Policy course as a first-year student and continued building her policy knowledge and analytical skills through experiences in and out of the classroom, including an internship at the U.S. Government Accountability Office. I’m thankful to UK Libraries for recognizing Siena's scholarship.”
Pilati will begin a Master's program in Public Policy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., beginning in the fall.
