Arundhati Baden-Mayer Eidinger is a first year Art History graduate student on the research track. Her studies are influenced by growing up with activist parents in historic and museum-filled Washington, D.C., making her research concerned with the intersection of art and politics. She attended the only arts high school in D.C., Duke Ellington School of the Arts, with a concentration in Museum Studies. There she co-curated exhibitions, worked with the portion of the Peggy Cooper Cafritz collection that the founder donated to the school, and interned at Hillwood Museum and Gardens. While completing their BA in Art History from Purchase College, Arundhati interned with Purchase Television as an archival assistant. She was the 2026 recipient of the Purchase Humanities Art History Prize before she presented her senior research project “American Amnesia: The Liberty Cap’s Uses and Abuses” at the Purchase College Humanities Symposium. Her investigation tracked the evolution of the Liberty (Phrygian) cap from a physical tool for manumission, to an allegorical symbol of freedom, and its implications in terms of American slavery and the journey to abolition.