Announcements for our Department Graduate Alumni

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Ben Jameson-Ellsmore (Ph.D 2023), recently authored the essay, "Settling in the Scars of the City ," on PLATFORM , October 30, 2023.

Diva Zumaya (Ph.D 2018), recently opened her exhibition The World Made Wondrous: The Dutch Collector's Cabinet and the Politics of Possession (Sep 17 2023 - Mar 3 2024) at LACMA. The exhibition won grants from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the French American Museum Exchange (FRAME), and The Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. For the exhibition, she and her team at LACMA produced an audio guide that received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Digital Humanities Grant. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication, written by Dr. Zumaya, which consists of five essays and thirty-five catalogue entries.

Sophia Quach McCabe (Ph.D. 2019) published “Courtly Splendor and Confessionalization: Hans Rottenhammer and the Transcultural Style” in Ekphrasis und Residenz – Höfische Kultur und das Medium des Reiseberichts im Zeitalter der Konfessionalisierung um 1600 , eds. M. Wenzel, W. Augustyn, A. Tacke (Petersberg, Germany: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2023), pp. 147–158; and “Renaissance Techniques and Contemporary Experimentations,” in Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative , ed. R. Garrett (Memphis; London: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; Paul Holberton Publishing, 2023), pp. 27–30; in May, she was invited to present at University of Chicago's Black Baroque Project Visiting Artist Interviews event, "Artist Harmonia Rosales in Conversation with Sophia Q. McCabe, PhD" ; in April, she gave a guest lecture at Austin Peay State University about Rosales's works; as guest curator, Sophia organized Sandy Rodriguez—Unfolding Histories: 200 Years of Resistance and On Famous Women, 1400–1700 , in collaboration with the Art, Design & Architecture Museum.

Emily J. Peters (Ph.D 2005), Curator of Prints and Drawings, Cleveland Museum of Art, published, as lead author and co-editor, with Laura Ritter, Tales of the City: Drawing in the Netherlands from Bosch to Bruegel (Cleveland Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 2022) in collaboration with the Albertina Museum, Vienna and the exhibition of the same name in Cleveland (Fall 2022), and in Vienna (Winter 2023), under the title Bruegel und Seine Zeit.

Yun-chen Lu (Ph.D. 2022) has been an assistant professor at the Department of History of Art and Architecture at DePaul University since July 2022. She has been awarded a 2023-25 DePaul Humanity Center Fellowship and 2023 Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies Early Career Fellowship in support of her book project "Paths to Artistic Eccentricity: Artists with Disabilities and Their Art in Eighteenth-Century Yangzhou."

Patricia Lee Daigle (Ph.D. 2015), Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, curated Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative , on view at the MBMA from March 10 - June 25, 2023. This exhibition originated at UCSB's Art, Design & Architecture Museum under the title Harmonia Rosales: Entwined , curated by Dr. Helen Morales, the Argyropoulos Professor of Hellenic Studies, and Dr. Sophia Quach McCabe (Ph.D. 2019).

Mary Okin (Ph.D. 2022), along with Olivia Bowman (San Jose State University), has been awarded a US Latino Digital Humanities (USLDH) Grant for the project March With Us! Lessons in Activism from San José State. The University of Houston USLDH Center is a digital scholarship/research undertaking to provide training and research on US Latino recovered materials and is housed at Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage/Arte Público Press. The USLDH Grants-in-Aid program is funded by the Mellon Foundation and designed to provide scholars a stipend for research and development of digital scholarship in the form of a digital publication and/or a digital project.

Alexandra Schultz (Ph.D. 2022) has penned the article, "Preserving home: resistance to cholera sanitation procedures in Egypt," Architecture_MPS 24, 1 (2023): 3. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2023v24i1.003 . The article explores the archive of resistance to understand the experience of cholera and cholera sanitation procedures in late nineteenth-century Egypt.

Shalini Kakar (Ph.D. 2010) has authored a new book, Devotional Fanscapes: Bollywood Star Deities, Devotee-Fans, and Cultural Politics in India and Beyond , Lanham: Lexington, 2023.

Alexandra Schultz (Ph.D. 2022) has received New York University's Abu Dhabi Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World for 2023-2024. This extremely competitive post-doctoral fellowship will give her a stipend and funding to travel to Egypt to complete her research for her book, based on her dissertation, "Living and Dying in Water: Fluid Infrastructure Disruptions in Urban Egypt (1870-1935)."

Veronica Roberts (M.A. 2005) has been named the John and Jill Freidenrich Director of the Cantor Arts Center , Stanford University.

John R. Senseney (Ph.D. 2002), has penned the essay, "Lessons from American Arcadia: White Spaces, Black Athletes, and Insulated Professors ," on PLATFORM , October 3, 2022.

Melinda McCurdy (Ph.D. 2005), curated the exhibition 100 Great British Drawings , on view at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens through September 5. It includes highlights from the collection of more than 12,000 British works held at the Huntington, the largest collection outside Britain.

John R. Senseney (Ph.D. 2002), Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Arizona, published an article, "Towards Equitable Histories of Ancient Built Environments ," on PLATFORM , May 16, 2022. The article contextualizes and builds upon his recent article in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. He also delivered a paper, "Unlearning Classical Architecture ," in the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Sustainability (IDEAS) session entitled "Radical Methods, New Interlocutors: Strategies for Equitable Histories " at the 75th International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 28, 2022. He's currently writing an article manuscript entitled, "Artisanship and Resistance in Classical Athens."

Monica Blackmun Visonà (Ph.D. 1983), Professor of Art and Visual Studies at the University of Kentucky, contributed to a new survey text, The History of Art: A Global View , published in 2022 by Thames & Hudson and distributed by W.W. Norton.  Her five chapters on art from Africa are interspersed with chronological accounts of the art of other continents, and she wrote additional sections that integrate Africa’s art history into thematic discussions. 

Joy Sperling (Ph.D. 1985) will retire after 32 years of teaching at Denison University. This tribute in The Denisonian highlights her career.

Lisa Volpe’s (Ph.D. 2013) exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer was listed on several top ten exhibition lists for 2021. It has travelled from Houston to the Addison Gallery, and will continue on to the Denver Art Museum and the Cincinnati Art Museum. The exhibition catalog was a finalist for the Prose Award by the American Association of Publishers, and won the Mitchell A. Wilder Design award. Her next publication, Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power, is being published by Steidl in time for the fall 2022 exhibition of the same title.

Melinda McCurdy (Ph.D. 2005) has curated the exhibition, "100 Great British Drawings ,” of rarely seen objects from The Huntington’s vast collection of British drawings and watercolors. She also discusses the formation of The Huntington’s British drawings collection in the Introduction of the richly illustrated exhibition catalog, Excursions of Imagination.

Yan Wenchang (Ph.D. 2016) has authored the essay, "Writing a History of Chinese Architecture ," which was published on PLATFORM, June 13, 2022.

John R. Senseney's (Ph.D. 2002) essay, "Towards Equitable Histories of Ancient Built Environments ," has been published on PLATFORM, May 16, 2022.

Sophia Ronan Rochmes's (Ph.D. 2015) essay, "Illuminating Luxury: The Gray-Gold Flemish Grisailles," has been published in lIluminating Metalwork: Metal, Object, and Image in Medieval Manuscripts , ed. Joseph Salvatore Ackley and Shannon L. Wearing (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022): 275-299.

Anna Myjak-Pycia (Ph.D. 2018), a postdoc at the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture (gta), Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich, published an article, "Home as an Aid: Domestic Design for Disabled Polio Survivors ", in Journal of Design History, and an article, "Forgoing the Architect’s Vision: American Home Economists as Pioneers of Participatory Design, 1930-60", in Architectural Research Quarterly. She also received a grant of the NOMIS Foundation to carry out the research project, "Beyond the Visual: Towards an Inclusive Architectural History."

Lynne Horiuchi (Ph.D. 2005) has been named a member of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) Strategic Planning Committee , charged with developing the Society’s vision and guiding principles for the next five years.

Sophia Quach McCabe's (Ph.D. 2019) essay, "Many Hands, Many Lands: Collaborative Copper Painting by Hans Rottenhammer, Paul Bril, and Jan Brueghel I", has been published by HMSTAH, an imprint of Brepols, in Many Antwerp Hands: Collaborations in Netherlandish Art , edited by A. D. Newman and L. Nijkamp. From the publisher: "A fresh look at the phenomenon of artistic collaboration in the early modern Low Countries."

Graduate Alumni

For lists of Graduate Alumni dissertations, see the department's most recent Ph.D. Dissertations (2022-2018) and Ph.D. Dissertations archive (2017-1972) .