Announcements for our Department Graduate Alumni

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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."

Lynette Korenic (Ph.D. 2006) retired from her position as Head of the Kohler Art Library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after 21 years. Lyn was the Arts Librarian at UCSB from 1988-99.

Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander (Ph.D. 2018) co-edited with Marci Kwon a special "In the Round" section for Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. " Asian American Art, Pasts and Futures ," was published in June 2021, and features 11 original essays, including one authored by Alexander, "Asian American Art and the Obligation of Museums ." The Asian American Art Initiative, which Alexander and Kwon co-direct, was recently awarded a Bank of America Art Conservation Grant for the treatment of 32 newly acquired works by Asian American artists.

John R. Senseney (Ph.D. 2002), Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Arizona, published an article, "The Architectural Origins of the Parthenon Frieze ," in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 80, no. 1 (2021): 12-29.

Faya Causey (Ph.D. 1984) was recently elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in London, is a elected a life board member of the Société Paul Cezanne, and a newly elected advisory board member of the Hillwood Museum in DC. She also continues for a second term as a board member of the Archaeological Institute of America, DC Society. She recently authored two essays for the 2020 exhibition catalogue, John Elderfield, ed., Cezanne: Rock and Quarry Paintings , which opened at Princeton in 2020. The online edition of Ancient Carved Ambers in the J. Paul Getty Museum was recently released, and she is currently finishing a book on ancient bronze statues as ritual deposits which she began as a Getty Scholar in 2017-2018.

Elizabeth Guffy (Ph.D. 1985) wrote an article for Places Journal (March 2021) entitled "Active Exclusion ," about flaws in the Roosevelt Island accessibility design.

Diva Zumaya (Ph.D. 2018), the Assistant Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), was featured as "Curator in the Spotlight " by CODART, a professional organization for curators of Dutch and Flemish art worldwide: On April 9th, 2021, Diva delivered the virtual talk “Reflections on Re-envisioning LACMA’s Permanent Collection,” at the conference Exhibiting Slavery and Representing Black Lives—Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures, organized by Harvard Art Museums. Diva also served as a speaker on the panel "Changing the Culture of Silence" at the 2021 Virtual Art Curators Conference for the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC).

J.V. Decemvirale (Ph.D. 2021) will be the Weisman Postdoctoral Instructor in Visual Culture and Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA for the 2021-2023 academic year. J.V. will be teaching undergraduate courses, as well as furthering his research and writing on Black and Latino Los Angeles.

Maggie Bell (Ph.D. 2019) has been permanently appointed Assistant Curator at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, CA. She has been in the position since July 2019, after completing a Graduate Academic Internship. Her exhibition, The Expressive Body: Memory, Devotion, Desire (1400-1750) , which was scheduled to open at the Norton Simon in April 2021, has been rescheduled for October 2021.

Charlene G. Garfinkle (Ph.D. 1986) has published a book chapter, “Charging Bull and Fearless Girl—A Dialogue,” in Teachable Monuments: Using Public Art to Spark Dialogue and Confront Controversies (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021). In May, she presented an invited lecture, There is more to art than painting. Highlights of American Sculpture at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, to the Museum’s Docent Council.

Aleesa Alexander (Ph.D. 2018), Assistant Curator of American Art at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, has launched (as founding co-director) the Asian American Art Initiative .

The Society of Architectural Historians has named Lynne Horiuchi (Ph.D. 2005) among their 2021 Class of Fellows , one of the Society’s highest honors

Lynne Horiuchi (Ph.D. 2005) will serve as Secretary on the incoming 2021 Board of the Society of Architectural Historians. Additionally, she will also be a member of the new SAH Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accountability, and Sustainability (IDEAS) Committee . The IDEAS Committee is charged with developing and guiding a diversity, equity and inclusion policy that also encompasses accountability and sustainability. The Committee will work with the SAH Board and SAH Strategic Planning Committee to devise sustainable DEI strategies for SAH and will make recommendations for actions to promote meaningful change within the Society’s culture.

Maggie Bell (Ph.D. 2019) has published the essay “On Display: Poverty as infirmity and its visual representation at the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala” in the volume Representing Infirmity: Diseased Bodies in Renaissance Italy , edited by John Henderson, Jonathan K. Nelson and Fredrika Jacobs (Routledge, 2020). Her exhibition, The Expressive Body: Memory, Devotion, Desire (1400-1750) , is scheduled to open at the Norton Simon in April 2021.

Lauren Weiss Bricker (Ph.D. 1992) is Interim Dean of the College of Environmental Design and Professor of Architecture at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona where she co-coordinates the historic preservation program, and is director of the ENV Archives-Special Collections. She was the Clarkson Chair in Planning 2019, University at Buffalo where she spoke on "Conserving the Vitality of our Historic Places ." Most recently, she contributed to Surveys and Inventories for Urban Heritage Management: Lessons from Los Angeles and Beyond (Getty, forthcoming) and World Histories of Architecture: The Emergence of a New Genre in the Nineteenth Century (MIT Press, forthcoming).

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) .

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