People
- 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)
- Graduate Student
Areas of Concentration: Colonial architecture of Western India, Architecture of the Indian Ocean region, Architectural education
Faculty Advisor: Swati Chattopadhyay
- 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)
- 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)
- She/Her/Hers
- Graduate Student
Areas of Concentration: Twentieth and Nineteenth-Century Architecture in the United States; Design and Material Culture; Decorative Arts; Indigenous Architecture of the Americas; Exhibition Histories
Faculty Advisor: Swati Chattopadhyay
Committee Members: Richard Wittman, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió (UC San Diego, Urban Studies and Planning)
Dissertation: "Domesticated Landscape of War: Army Housing in the United States 1890-1996"
M.A. Thesis: "Dreamscapes of Domestic Fantasy: Advertising 1970s Interiors" (University of Brighton, 2016)
- 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)
- She/Her/Hers
- Graduate Student
Areas of Concentration: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art; Early Modern Print Culture; Illustrated Travelogues; Dutch Global Expanses; Indonesia
Faculty Advisor: Ann Jensen Adams
Committee Members: Mark Meadow, María Lumberas
Dissertation: "Picturing Indonesia in the Dutch Republic: Johan Nieuhof's Gedenkwaerdige zee en lantreize door de voornaemste landschappen van West en Oostindien (“Memorable Sea and Land Voyage through the Principal Landscape of the West and East Indies”), 1682"
M.A. Thesis: "From Wool to Paper: Johannes Stradanus and the Transmediality of his ‘Hunting Scenes'" (The Courtauld Institute of Art, completed 2015)
- 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)
- 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
- 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)
- 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)
- 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)
- 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)
- 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
- 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)
- 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)
- He/Him/His
- Graduate Student
Areas of Concentration: Modern German religious architecture, Historic preservation, Landscape studies
Faculty Advisor: Volker M. Welter
M.A. Thesis: "The Role of Museums and Historic Preservation in the Creation of German National Identity, Illustrated in the Magazine Die Denkmalpflege, 1899-1922," completed 2022
- 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"
- 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)
- 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)
- 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)
- 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)
- 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)
- 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
- 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)
- 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)
- 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)
- 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)
- 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"
- 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)
- 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)