People

Ann Jensen Adams
  • Professor

17th-century Dutch Art; Visual Culture & History of Science (16th - 18th centuries); Early Modern Gender Studies; Portraiture.

Alec Aldrich
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Seventeenth-century Dutch art; early modern print culture
Faculty Advisor: Ann Jensen Adams
Committee Members: Mark Meadow, María Lumberas
Dissertation: "Common Ground: Landscape and the Mediation of Technology in the Dutch Republic"
M.A. Thesis: "'The Town Hall Speaks': The Old Town Hall in Rembrandt's Amsterdam" (Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, completed 2018)

C. Edson Armi
  • Professor Emeritus

Romanesque architecture and sculpture, twelfth-century Gothic art, and American twentieth-century commercial design.

Heather Badamo
  • Assistant Professor

East Christian and Byzantine art; Coptic art; medieval Mediterranean studies; the Global Middle Ages; postcolonial theory; art and war.

Ann Bermingham
  • Professor Emeritus

18th and 19th-century European art, particularly British art.

Alicia Boswell
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Assistant Professor

Pre-Columbian art and archaeology; cultural heritage; conservation; cultural landscapes; culture contact; frontiers; metalworking and ancient technology; craft production.

Christian Brown
  • He/Him/His
  • Financial and Budget Manager
  • Arts Administrative Support Center
  • (805) 893-3984
  • Arts 1248
Sandra Caceres
  • She/Her/Hers/Ella
  • Academic Personnel & Services Manager
  • Arts Administrative Support Center
  • (805) 893-2454
  • Arts 1244
Allison Caplan
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Assistant Professor

Mesoamerican art; ancient and colonial Latin America; art theory and aesthetics; materiality; art and language.

  • Arts 2312
Swati Chattopadhyay
  • Professor

Modern architecture and urbanism; Cultural landscape of colonialism; British empire; Postcolonial and critical theory.

Hunter Clark
  • Academic Program Manager
  • Graduate Advisor
  • History of Art & Architecture
Letícia Cobra Lima
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Women and Queer Artists; Contemporary Latin American Art; Assemblage Art and the Found Object; Sculpture
Faculty Advisor: Jenni Sorkin
Committee Members: Laurie Monahan, Aleca Le Blanc (History of Art, UC Riverside), and Colin Gardner (Art, UCSB)
Dissertation: "Assembling the Body: South American Assemblage Art, 1960-1996"
M.A. Thesis: "Feminist Practices as Antagonism: Anti-Hegemonic Artistic-political Incursions" (Santa Catarina State University, Florianópolis, Brazil, completed 2014)

Herbert M. Cole
  • Professor Emeritus

African Art and architecture; Oceanic and Native American arts.

Ali Derafshi
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: 20th Century Architecture and Urbanism, Modern and Contemporary Iranian Architecture
Faculty Advisor: Volker M. Welter
M.Arch. Thesis: “Disappearing Lives: The Material Culture of Sarā-ye Moshir” (McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada, completed 2013)

Suzanne Dougherty
  • Director
  • Arts Administrative Support Center
  • (805) 893-4444
  • Arts 1242
Sylvia Faichney
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture in the United States; Design and Material Culture; Indigenous Architecture of the Americas; Exhibition Histories
Faculty Advisor: Swati Chattopadhyay
M.A. Thesis: "Dreamscapes of Domestic Fantasy: Advertising 1970s Interiors" (University of Brighton, 2016)

Samira Fathi
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Iranian Architecture, Nineteenth-century Iranian Urbanism
Faculty Advisor: Nuha N. N. Khoury
Dissertation: "Representing Eighteenth-Century Isfahan: Urban Spaces and Architectural Patronage"
M.A. Thesis: "Tehran’s Dowlat Quarter: Culture of living and urban spaces in Dowlat Quarter during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (1848- 96)" (Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, completed 2013)

Ramón Favela
  • Research Professor Emeritus
Graham Feyl
  • He/Him/His
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Modern and contemporary art; Craft history, materiality and practices; queer and transgender art practices; the relationship of queerness and craft
Faculty Advisor: Jenni Sorkin
M.A. Thesis: "Artificial Nature and Total Indulgence: Queer Craft in the Works of Arch Connelly, Nicolas Moufarrege and Greer Lankton" (The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2020)

Danielle Freeman
  • Financial Coordinator
  • History of Art & Architecture
  • Arts 1254
Christine Fritsch
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Assistant Curator
  • Image Resource Center
  • History of Art & Architecture
  • ​(805) 893-7403
  • Arts 1258
Emma Gagnon
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art; Prints; Illustrated Travelogues; Dutch Global Expanses; Cultural Exchange in the early modern period
Faculty Advisor: Ann Jensen Adams
Committee Members: Mark Meadow, Michael North (History, Universität Greifswald)
M.A. Thesis: "From Wool to Paper: Johannes Stradanus and the Transmediality of his ‘Hunting Scenes'" (The Courtauld Institute of Art, completed 2015)

Anahit Galstyan
  • Graduate Student

Area of Concentration: 12-14th century Eastern Mediterranean
Faculty Advisor: Heather Badamo
M.A. Thesis: "Armeno-Muslim cultural interactions in late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Anatolia: kumbets and the cross-cultural transmission of architectural knowledge" (Central European University, Budapest, completed 2017)

Colin Gardner
  • Affiliated Faculty
Sophia Gimenez
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Feminist Theory, Contemporary Art, Critical Theory, European 20th-century Art, and Visual Culture
Faculty Advisor: E. Bruce Robertson
M.A. Thesis: "Hot Off the Press: Image-Making, Eroticism, Counterculture, and Obscenity in Yayoi Kusama's Underground Newspaper," completed 2018

Felicity Good
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Artistic exchange between Northern Europe, Spain, and Colonial Latin America during the sixteenth century; history of print and book production; Early Modern epistemologies
Faculty Advisor: Mark A. Meadow
Dissertation: “Locating Childhood: The Visual Culture of Children in Early Modern Antwerp and Mexico City”
M.A. Thesis: “A Lost Eyckian Painting and a Possible Fifteenth-Century Prototype for Quentin Metsys’s The Moneylender and His Wife” (The Pennsylvania State University, completed 2015)

Claudia Grego March
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: 20th century European and Latin American art, geopolitics and culture, art theory
Faculty Advisor: Laurie Monahan
Committee Members: Sven Spieker (Germanic and Slavic Studies, UCSB), Cristina Venegas (Film and Media Studies, UCSB), Pamela Radcliff (History, UCSD)
Dissertation: "El arte de América Latina es la revolución: networks of political art between Spain and Latin America during the late Francoist dictatorship (1960-1975)"
M.A. Thesis: "Les difficultés et ambiguïtés politiques d’Antoni Tàpies pendant le Franquisme" (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, completed 2017)

Leslie Huang
  • They/Them/Their
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Sensory and affect studies, material culture in early modern China, literati painting and calligraphy, contemporary Chinese art and visual culture
Faculty Advisor: Peter Sturman
M.A. Thesis: "Exercising for Self-Cultivation: Luohans and Yangsheng in the late Ming" (Faculty Group in Asian Studies, UC-Berkeley, completed 2019)

Ben Jameson-Ellsmore
  • He/Him/His
  • Graduate Student
  • Visiting Lecturer

Areas of Concentration: American public space and public sphere, the urban commons, maker- and hackerspaces, history of modern and postmodern architecture, and continental philosophy
Faculty Advisor: Swati Chattopadhyay
Committee Members: Richard Wittman, Alenda Chang (Film and Media Studies, UCSB)
Dissertation: "Please Hack: Makerspaces, Hackerspaces and Public Life in the Detroit and San Francisco Metropolitan Areas"
M.A. Thesis: "Pseudo-Public: Public Spaces as Self-Contradictory Enclosures" (California State University, Stanislaus, completed 2016)

Alida Jekabson
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Modern and Contemporary art; museum history; craft history; folk art; art and migration
Faculty Advisor: Jenni Sorkin
M.A. Thesis: "Staging a Modern Nation: The Art and Architecture of the Peruvian Pavilion at the 1939/40 New York World’s Fair" (Hunter College, City University of New York, 2019)

Victoria Jennings
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Ancient Greek and Roman artwork, ancient cults, mythology, witchcraft, magic, tattooing, human remains in museums, NAGPRA and museum practices
Faculty Advisor: Claudia Moser
M.A. Thesis: "I Sing the Body Magical: Baubo and Her Apotropaic Power," completed 2020

Hannah Kagan-Moore
  • She/Her/Hers/They/Them/Their
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Early Modern German paintings and prints, identity formation, civic identity, class struggle
Faculty Advisor: Mark A. Meadow
Committee Members: Hilary Bernstein (History, UCSB), Andrew Morrall (Bard Graduate Center)
Dissertation: "Social Identity and the City in the Augsburger Monatsbilder"
M.A. Thesis: "White Christian European Identity, Monstrosity and Morality in Bosch's 1482 Vienna Last Judgment" (UC-Davis, completed 2015)

Nuha N. N. Khoury
  • Associate Professor

Islamic architecture and urbanism, 7th - 9th centuries and 17th century; medieval Islamic Iconography; modern art of the Arab world; critiques of the field.

Jacqueline Enez Dymont Lewis
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Modern and Contemporary Art; African American Art; Arts of the diaspora
Faculty Advisor: Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie
M.A. Thesis: "Getting Under Our Skin: Political Critique in Barbara Kruger's Photomontages" (Hunter College, City University of New York, completed 2006)

Matthew Limb
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Modern and Contemporary Art, Craft, and Design; Environmental Humanities and Ecology; Environmental Design and Sustainability; Queer Cultural Production and Theory; Material Culture Studies
Faculty Advisor: Jenni Sorkin
Committee Members: E. Bruce Robertson, Volker Welter
Disstertation: "'Living on the Edge': Craft, Land Use, and the American Environment"
M.A. Thesis: "Don't Forget to Remember: The Defiant Queer Hand in David McDiarmid's Man Quilt, 1978" (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, completed 2015)

Alexander Luckmann
  • He/Him/His
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Modern German religious architecture, Historic preservation, Landscape studies
Faculty Advisor: Volker M. Welter

María Lumbreras
  • She/Her/Ella
  • Assistant Professor

Arts of the Iberian world, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; interactions of art and science; early modern antiquarianism; early modern art theory; histories of record-keeping and evidence-handling technologies; historiographies of art.

Margaret Mansfield
  • Graduate Student

Area of Concentration: Seventeenth-century Dutch Prints and Publication History; Illustrated Travelogues in Global Context
Faculty Advisor: Ann Jensen Adams
Committee Members: Swati Chattopadhyay, Barbara Holdrege (Religious Studies, UCSB)
Dissertation: "Image Reincarnation in Early Modern Dutch Illustrated Travelogues"
M.A. Thesis: "Ordered Disorder: Dutch Painting of the Topsy-Turvy World" (Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, completed 2013)

Mark A. Meadow
  • Professor

Northern European Art, 15th - 17th century; Kunst- and Wunderkammern; History of Museums and Collecting; Early-Modern Spectacle.

Henning von Mirbach
  • Visiting Lecturer

Areas of Concentration: Chinese painting and calligraphy, East Asian art.

  • Arts 1262
Mohammadreza Mirzaei
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Global postwar art, Iranian modernism and contemporary art, history of photography
Faculty Advisors: Laurie Monahan, Sven Spieker (Germanic & Slavic Studies, UCSB)
Committee Members: Janet Afary (Religious Studies, UCSB), Emily Braun (Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY)
Dissertation: "'The Maximum Out of the Minimum Freedom of Speech': Bahman Mohassess’s Painting in the Context of Iranian Art During the 1960s"

Laurie Monahan
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Associate Professor
  • Department Chair

Surrealism; French art (interwar period); European 20th-century Art; American Post-WWII Art; Visual Culture; Critical Theory.

  • (805) 893-8060 (Chair’s office)
  • Arts 1240 (Chair's office)
  • Arts 1218 (Faculty office)
Sara Morris
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Modern and Contemporary Art, Studio Craft, Material Culture, and Museum History; Digital Media Art and Technology; Feminist Art and Theory
Faculty Advisor: Jenni Sorkin
Committee Members: Laurie Monahan, Jason Weems (History of Art, UC Riverside), Cécile Whiting (Art History and Visual Studies, UC Irvine)
Dissertation: "Figurative Sculpture and the Crafting of Identity in Postwar American Art, 1960-1990"
M.A. Thesis: "Crafting Autonomy: A Reevaluation of the Pedestal in the Sculpture of Arlene Shechet, Nicole Cherubini, and Francesca DiMattio" (San José State University, completed 2017)

Claudia Moser
  • Associate Professor
  • Graduate Advisor

Roman Republican sanctuaries; altars; ancient rituals; cults and burial practices.

Callan Nowacki
  • Undergraduate Program Advisor
  • History of Art & Architecture
Jeff O'Brien
  • Curator
  • Image Resource Center
  • History of Art & Architecture
  • (805) 893-2509
  • Arts 1245B
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie
  • Guggenheim Foundation Fellow 2022
  • Professor

African and African Diaspora Arts and Visual Culture; Contemporary Art; Cultural Patrimony Research, and Critical Theory.

Carole Paul
  • Senior Lecturer
  • Director of Museum Studies

17th- and 18th-century art and architecture in Italy; history of collecting and museums.

Jeanette Favrot Peterson
  • Research Professor and Professor Emeritus

Precolumbian and Colonial Latin American art, Marian imagery, Early Modern Spain.

Mike Rambour
  • Applications and Database Programmer
  • History of Art & Architecture
  • (805) 893-7894
  • Arts 1264
A. Colin Raymond
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Contemporary Japanese Art, Global Contemporary, Video Art, New Media
Faculty Advisors: Jenni Sorkin and Bert Winther-Tamaki (Art History, UC Irvine)
Dissertation: "Formulations of a Medium: The Rise of Video in Japanese Art 1965-1989"
M.A. Thesis: "Re-Evaluating Murakami’s Superflat: Toward a Contextualized Interpretation of Contemporary Japanese Art" (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, completed 2015)

Gabriel Ritter
  • He/Him/His
  • Associate Professor
  • Director of the Art Design & Architecture Museum

Contemporary art; Japanese art (1868 to present); Global Surrealism; Museum Studies.

  • Arts 1626 (AD&A Museum office)
  • Arts 2312 (Faculty office)
E. Bruce Robertson
  • Professor Emeritus
  • History of Art & Architecture
  • Director Emeritus
  • Art Design & Architecture Museum UCSB

American art; History of collecting and museums; British watercolors.

Lilit Sadoyan
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Eighteenth-century French decorative arts and sculpture, the history of collecting and display, museums
Faculty Advisors: E. Bruce Robertson, Mark A. Meadow
Committee Member: Mimi Hellman (Art History, Skidmore College)
Dissertation: "Meuble and Mobility: Furniture in Long-Eighteenth-Century France"
M.A. Thesis: "Collecting at Court and Beyond: The Dissemination and Display of Girardon’s Sculptural Groups" (UC Riverside, completed 2010)

Iman Salty
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: 20th Century German Art and Visual Culture; Weimar Republic and Interwar Avant-Gardes; Cold War-Era Performance Art in Central and Eastern Europe; Histories and Theories of Mass Media, Materiality, Performance, and Photography
Faculty Advisor: Laurie Monahan
Committee Members: Laurie Monahan, Sven Spieker (Germanic and Slavic Studies, UCSB), Patrice Petro (Film and Media Studies, UCSB)
M.A. Thesis: "Deconstructing the War Monument, Redefining the War Hero: Antimilitarism in Berlin Dada, 1920" (The Courtauld Institute of Art, completed 2018)

Betty Schlothan
  • Graduate Student

Area of Concentration: Northern Renaissance
Faculty Advisor: Mark A. Meadow
Dissertation: "Visual Constructions and Assertions of Community in the Early Modern Towns of the German Erzgebirge"
M.A. Thesis: "Intriguing Relationships: An Exploration of Early Modern German Prints of Relic Displays and Reliquaries" (UC Riverside, completed 2013)

Nathan Segura
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Modern/Contemporary Art
Faculty Advisor: Laurie Monahan
Committee Members: Jenni Sorkin, Cristina Venegas (Film and Media Studies, UCSB)
M.A. Thesis: "Censored Ambiguity: María Izquierdo’s Tribute to Mexico," completed 2022

Nisha Shanghavi
  • Graduate Student

Area of Concentration: 19th century British India
Faculty Advisor: Swati Chattopadhyay
M.A. Thesis: "Lajja: Contesting Ideal Womanhood in Contemporary Hindi Film" (University of Texas at Austin, completed 2002)
M.A. Thesis: "Photographs by Tseng Kwong Chi: Diaspora and Self-Representation" (University at Buffalo, completed 2001)

Mallory Sharp
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: African, African Diaspora and African American art, museum and exhibition histories
Faculty Advisor: Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie
Committee Members: Swati Chattopadhyay, Jeffrey Stewart (Black Studies, UCSB), Amy Buono (Art, Chapman University)
M.A. Thesis: "Readjustments: Kupka’s Return to Painting in Peacetime" (Indiana University, Bloomington, completed 2014)

Megan Sheard
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Australian colonial material culture and landscape; penal and revival architecture; Aboriginal cultural landscapes and agriculture; postcolonial theory and decolonial practice; African art and performance of the colonial period
Faculty Advisor: Swati Chattopadhyay
M.A. Thesis: "Materialising Mythologies: Shaker Chairs and the 'Transcendent Good'" (Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, completed 2014)

Elizabeth Driscoll Smith
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Twentieth-century American Art, Craft, and Material Culture; the Relationship Between Race and Modernism; Histories of Folk and Self-Taught Art; Artist-Built Environments; Exhibition Histories; Curatorial Practice
Faculty Advisor: Jenni Sorkin
Committee Members: Laurie Monahan, Jeffrey Stewart (Black Studies, UCSB), Katherine Jentleson (Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art, High Museum of Art)
Dissertation: “Build/Live/Work: Artist-Built Environments and the Expanded Vernacular in the Twentieth Century”
M.A. Thesis: "Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, and the Collapse of 'Surrealist Photography'" (Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville, completed 2016)

Jenni Sorkin
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Professor
  • Undergraduate Advisor

Contemporary art; material culture, craft, and design; gender and artistic labor; art criticism; feminist historiographies and theory; alternative spaces; art school pedagogies; global exhibition practice and history; queer culture and theory.

Peter Sturman
  • Professor

Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, Early to Modern; intersections of texts, theories, and images.

Thuy N. D. Tran
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Modern and Contemporary Art; Asia and the Asian Diaspora; Postcolonial Cultural Theory; Institutional Critique, Curatorial Practices, Museology
Advisors: Laurie Monahan, E. Bruce Robertson
Committee Member: Linda Vo (Asian American Studies, UC Irvine)
Dissertation: "Saigon Modernisms: Art of a New Nation, 1954-1975"

Taylor Van Doorne
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: 18th and 19th century European architecture; monuments and public space; ephemeral architecture; architectural theory
Faculty Advisor: Richard Wittman
Committee Members: Swati Chattopadhyay, Manuel Covo (History, UCSB)
Dissertation: “Ephemeral Monuments, the Modern French State, and the Parisian Public, 1789-1848”
M.A. Thesis: "Moralizing Utopia: The Virtues of Collectivity and Happiness in Ledoux’s Ideal City of Chaux" (Tufts University, completed 2016)

Miriam Wattles
  • Professor Emeritus

Early Modern and Modern Japanese Visual Culture: illustrated books and print culture, ukiyo-e woodblock prints, painting, calligraphy.

Volker M. Welter
  • Professor

Modern architecture; domestic architecture; émigré architects; patronage; histories of modernism, revival styles, and sustainable architecture.

Jeremy White
  • He/Him/His
  • Continuing Lecturer

Architecture of the United States; Contemporary architecture.

Rachel Winter
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Contemporary art from the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey; Museum History, Theory, and Display (US and Global); Global Contemporary art; Cultural Exchange; Biennials; the Art Market; Globalization; World's Fairs & Festivals
Faculty Advisor: Jenni Sorkin
Committee Members: Laurie Monahan, Heather Badamo, Sarah-Neel Smith (Art History, Maryland Institute College of Art)
Dissertation: "A Spectacle of Inclusion: The Rise of Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey in the United States and England, 1970-2020"
M.A. Thesis: "Out of the Periphery: Identity and Protest Art Amidst Alternative Revolutions" (Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies, University of Iowa, completed 2017)

Richard Wittman
  • Associate Professor
  • Graduate Admissions Advisor

Cultural history of European architecture and town planning, 17th - 19th centuries; theory and historiography of architecture.