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)

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

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

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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.

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

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"

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)

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

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

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)

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

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)

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)

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.

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

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)

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

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)