Keynote Speaker

Dr. Stephen Vider, Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Public History Initiative, Cornell University

Stephen Vider is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Public History Initiative at Cornell University.  His research examines the social practices and politics of everyday life in the 20th century United States, with a focus on intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. His new book, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II (University of Chicago Press, 2021), traces how American conceptions of the home have shaped LGBTQ relationships and politics from 1945 to the present. The book received honorable mentions for the 2022 John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association for best book in American studies and the 2022 Alan Bray for best book in LGBTQ studies, given jointly by the Queer/Trans Caucus of the American Studies Association and the Gay and Lesbian Quarterly Caucus of the Modern Language Association. It was also one of six finalists for the Huntington Library’s biennial Shapiro Prize for best first scholarly monograph in U.S. history.

Vider has also contributed to a range of public history projects. At the Museum of the City of New York, he curated the exhibition AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism (May to October 2017), exploring how activists and artists have mobilized domestic space and redefined family in response to HIV/AIDS, from the 1980s to the present. A Place in the City, a short film he co-directed with Nate Lavey for the exhibition, has since been featured in film festivals and programs in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Istanbul. Vider was also co-curator of the exhibition Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York (October 2016 to February 2017) and co-author of an accompanying book, a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He has also published essays in the New York Times, Avidly, Time, and Slate, among other places.

Before coming to Cornell, Vider was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr College and a postdoctoral fellow in the history of sexuality at Yale University.

Schedule

Thank you to our Co-Sponsors:

Department of History of Art & Architecture, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Multicultural Center, History Department, German and Slavic Studies Department, Feminist Studies Department, Art, Design & Architecture Museum, English Department, Spanish and Portuguese Department, Graduate Student Association, The Graduate Division, Office of the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, Department of Film and Media Studies.

Presenter Profiles

Panel: Begin With...
Moderated by Alida Jekabson, History of Art & Architecture, UCSB

Sara Morris
History of Art & Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara
"Kinship Structures: Viola Frey, Charles Fiske, and Figurative Ceramics in California, 1960-1990"

Sara Morris is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Art & Architecture Department with a doctoral emphasis in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation, "Figurative Sculpture and the Crafting of Identity in Postwar American Art, 1960- 1990" traces a history of figurative ceramic sculpture in the United States, exploring the ways in which artists emphasized the body, narrative imagery, handmaking, and community to better convey the multivalent aspects of identity during the mid-to-late twentieth century. Her paper “Kinship Structures: Viola Frey’s Group Sculptures and Figurative Ceramics in California, 1960- 1990,” stems from the first chapter of her dissertation and an article manuscript on the subject is currently under review for the Archives of American Art Journal. Her project is supported by a 2023 Library Research Grant at the Getty Research Institute, a 2023 NCECA Helen Zucker Seeman Curatorial, Research, and Critical Writing Fellowship for Women, and a 2021-2022 Predoctoral Smithsonian Fellowship in American Craft at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). Sara currently holds a position as the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative Curatorial Assistant at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery.

Cole J. Graham
History of Art, The Ohio State University
"Inefficient, Unsustainable, and Fragmentary: The Rauschenberg Combines as Disabled Bodies"

Cole J. Graham is a dog enthusiast, an autistic trans man, and a Ph.D. student in History of Art at The Ohio State University. Previous study has taken him to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and the City University of New York. His research takes place at the intersection of (trans)gender and dis/ability in 20th Century painting, interrogating the ways in which modernist tendencies toward purity and efficiency have limited possibilities for disabled mind-bodies (and indeed all mind-bodies). Cole previously served as curatorial intern at the Wexner Center for the Arts, where he worked on the current A.K. Burns exhibition Of space we are..., and has also published on visual constructions of monstrosity in pop culture.

Letícia Cobra Lima
History of Art & Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara
"Marisol: Queering Art Historical Time"

Letícia Cobra Lima is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Art & Architecture department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a doctoral emphasis in Feminist Studies (2020). She specializes in modern and contemporary women and queer artists from Latin America, and works to foster transnational, interdisciplinary networks for the study of and engagement with art from the Americas. Her dissertation, “Assembling the Body: Sculpture in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, 1960-1996,” thematizes the body-based assemblage art of Farnese de Andrade (b. Brazil, 1926-1996), Feliza Bursztyn (b. Colombia, 1933-1982), and Liliana Maresca (b. Argentina, 1951-1994), in their interrogation of issues such as citizenship amidst political turmoil, the status of the artwork, traditional gender roles, and the ever-present aftereffects of colonization. Letícia was the recipient of the 2019-20, 2020-21, and 2022-23 Murray Roman Curatorial Fellowship by the Art, Design & Architecture Museum (UCSB). She has an MFA from Santa Catarina State University (Brazil, 2014) and bachelor’s degrees in Graphic Design (Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, 2011) and Visual Arts (Santa Catarina State University, Brazil, 2015).

Laurie White
Art History, the University of British Columbia
"Stuck in the Throat: Scale, Network and Threshold in Julie Mehretu’s Site-Specific Paintings"

Laurie White is a curator and writer whose research explores modes of ecological practice in contemporary art and theory. She is particularly interested in works that model ecological consciousness through systems thinking and complexity.

In 2021, Laurie curated Shimmering Horizons, an online group exhibition co-produced by the Or Gallery, Vancouver and Canada House, London UK, which considered feminist and Indigenous futurisms. Her published essays include “Every Being is a Score for Another'' in Wetland Project: Explorations in Sound, Ecology and Post-Geographical Art (Figure 1, 2022); “A Braided River: Ecofeminist Currents in Radial Change, Collective Acts and Hexsa’a̱m” in Beginning with the Seventies (Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2020); and “The Phenomenal Close-up: Abstraction as Enmeshment in Phyllis Webb’s Photo-Collage” in A Dream in the Eye: The Complete Paintings and Collages of Phyllis Webb (TalonBooks, forthcoming).

Originally from Sheffield, England Laurie currently lives in Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. She holds an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia, where she is currently pursuing a PhD in Art History.

Panel: Edges
Moderated by Megan Sheard, History of Art & Architecture, UCSB

Corey Ratch
Art History, Columbia University
"Pineal/Perineal: The Anthropological Divide at Monkey Hill"

Corey Ratch is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University in New York. He specializes in interwar French and German art and photography with an interest in contested divisions between humans and other animals in philosophy, politics, and culture. His dissertation addresses the impact of images of slaughtered animals, and how as production increased throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the slaughterhouse became increasingly removed from public view. This history in no small part helped pave the way for the contemporary factory farm and the current ecological crisis. His work is motivated largely by critical animal studies, posthumanism, and biosemiotics, focusing on depictions of nonhuman animals in art, how discourses of animality intersect with race, gender, and class, and how we are affected by images of violence and dismemberment.

M.C. Overholt
Architecture History and Theory,
University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design
"Lessons from the Participatory Clinic: Architecture, Abortion, and Interiority at the Feminist Women’s Health Centers"

M.C. Overholt (she/her) is a PhD in Architecture History and Theory at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. She is also a graduate of the M.E.D. program at Yale School of Architecture (’21), where she completed a thesis project titled “Space-Praxis: Towards a Feminist Politics of Design” and co-founded the M.E.D. Working Group for Anti-Racism. M.C. is currently interested in convergences in the histories of 20th century sexual science and architecture, and is committed to Black feminist and queer of color theories, histories of sexuality, affect theory, and trans* new materialisms. For the 47th AHGSA Symposium at UC Santa Barbara, M.C. will revisit research on the design of feminist self-help abortion clinics of the 1970s and 80s in the United States. This research has led to the publication of two short essays in Platform and a longer essay that is forthcoming in a collection edited by S.E. Eisterer, tentatively titled Living Room: Gender, Architecture, Theory.

Yoobin Shin
Art History, University of Toronto
"'Invisibility, Space and Monument: Activism through Absence"

Yoobin Shin (she/her) is a MA student in the Art History Department at the University of Toronto. Her current research explores modern and contemporary multi-media arts that visualize intersectional identity and concern on the national discourse. Prior to undertaking her master’s degree, she received her BA in Art History and Classical Studies from the University of British Columbia in 2021. During her graduate and undergraduate time, Yoobin held several assistant positions both in the private and not-for-profit sectors, including a Cultural Programmer at the Arts Council of New Westminster, an Educational Research Assistant at Greenwood, Blackwood, and a Gallery/Event assistant at the West Vancouver Community Arts Council. With her art historical knowledge, she, as a settler of colour with Asian heritage, hopes to contribute herself to a valuable project of building community with love and care and creating public platforms to engage with diverse contemporary issues through arts.

Panel: Sensing
Moderated by Leslie Huang, History of Art & Architecture, UCSB

Rachel Williams
Art History, University of Toronto
"Flirting with Violence and Fantasy"

Rachel Williams is an MA student in the Art History Department at the University of Toronto, where she received her Bachelor's degree in Art History and Classical Civilizations. Her scholarship focuses on the impact of the Ancient World on Renaissance culture, deciphering the ever-present Renaissance fascination with the poetry, myths, and artistic conventions of the ancient Greeks and Romans. She has had the privilege of spending a summer studying at the University of Sienna, where she immersed herself in the art and cultures that she had known only from textbooks, and this experience launched her forward to continuing her studies at the University. Her MA research focuses on Early Modern art and she plans to continue her studies by researching the gendered reasons and consequences behind female personifications in art from the Ancient World.

Reed O'Mara
Art History, Case Western Reserve University
"After the Door Opens, Before It Closes: Performing the Images of the Shefokh ḥamatkha in Fifteenth-Century Haggadot"

Reed O’Mara is a third-year PhD candidate and Mellon Fellow in the joint art history program between Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). Reed focuses on the art of premodern Germany, and her primary research interests lie in Jewish illuminated manuscripts and the reception of medieval art. At present, Reed is a curatorial intern in the Department of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the CMA. Reed has presented papers at various conferences, including the International Congress on Medieval Studies and the Medieval Academy of America. She currently serves as Chair of the Graduate Student Committee of the Medieval Academy, and she is also the Mentorship and Professionalization Coordinator for the Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies Board of Directors.

Emily Leifer
History of Art, Bryn Mawr College
"The Work of Art in/as the Urban Environment: James Turrell’s Mendota Stoppages (1969-1974)"

Emily Leifer is a PhD candidate in the history of art at Bryn Mawr College, working with Professor Homay King. She studies modern and contemporary art, focusing on art of the 1960s and 1970s. Her dissertation explores Light and Space installation art and evolving concepts of the environment, both architectural and ecological, in the United States around the mid-twentieth century. Emily received her M.A. from Williams College and her B.A. from Brandeis University. She has held curatorial internships at the ICA Philadelphia, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, and David Zwirner Gallery.

Moderator Profiles

Alida Jekabson is a PhD student in the History of Art and Architecture at UCSB. Jekabson’s research focuses on modern and contemporary American craft with an emphasis on the development and circulation of craft knowledge within contexts of displacement. Prior to her studies at UCSB, Jekabson was a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York where she provided curatorial support for exhibitions and collections work related to contemporary craft and design. She holds an MA in Art History and Curatorial Studies from Hunter College at the City University of New York.

Megan J. Sheard is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art and Architecture department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a co-managing editor for volume 3 of react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture. Her research focuses on colonial architecture as landscape transformation in colonial Tasmania, and considers how convict industries transformed Aboriginal land into architectural material. Megan received her MA in Applied Design and Art at Curtin University, Perth (Western Australia) in 2014. She is a craftsperson and musician, and a current fellow in the Public Humanities Graduate Fellows program at UCSB.

Leslie Huang is a PhD student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at UC Santa Barbara. They received their M.A. in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley. They study early modern (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) Chinese painting and contemporary Chinese art and film. Their current project considers the role of paintings as a form of epistolary exchange, which facilitated the production of social relations in early modern Nanjing.

Symposium Organizer Profiles

Sylvia Faichney is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara specializing in architecture in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sylvia completed her M.A. in Design History and Material Culture in 2016 at the University of Brighton, earning a Distinction. She has published in the second volume of react/review as well as in Interiors: Design/ Architecture/Culture and Construction Literary Magazine. She has worked with various museums, including MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the Chicago Cultural Center. Sylvia is currently the Murray Roman Curatorial Fellow at the Art, Design, & Architecture Museum and a current recipient of the Margaret Mallory Fellowship.

Graham Feyl is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he researches the history and production of queer and transgender craft practices and materials. He received his M.A in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020, where he was a Graduate Curatorial Fellow. He has worked on various curatorial projects in Chicago and Portland. He is part of the first cohort of writers for the journal American Art’s Towards Equity in Publishing initiative. Graham was the recipient of the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Predoctoral Fellowship for Historians of American Art to Travel Abroad in 2022. Currently, he is a guest editor of Decorating Dissidence.

Past Symposia

The 46th Annual Academic Symposium: Objects of Affection: Itineraries, Sensations, and "Thingness"

Friday, May 6, 2022 | Online, with in-person screening in Arts 1332 | 9:30 AM – 3:30 PM

This symposium's keynote address given by Sally M. Promey, Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies at Yale University and the program included three panel discussions of graduate presenters. This year's theme, more specifically, asked participants to examine human engagements with the art, cultural, and/or religious object to consider more broadly how objects can accumulate affective value by their movement and display. Click here to view the Symposium program and presenter profiles .

The 45th Annual Academic Symposium: Haunting the Canon: The Super-phenomena in Art

Friday, April 23, 2021 | Online | 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM

This symposium was held virtually on Zoom, with a keynote address given by Robb Hernández, Associate Professor of English at Fordham University. The speakers’ pre-recorded papers were available two weeks prior to the event and shared with registrants. The virtual symposium included the keynote presentation and facilitated discussions on the papers, allowing the audience to ask questions live. Click here to view the Symposium program and presenter profiles .

The 44th Annual Academic Symposium: Visualizing Place and Space

Friday, April 26, 2019 | Multicultural Center Theater | 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM

The keynote address was from Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, SUNY Stonybrook. The symposium theme focused on how the visual arts both represent and shape experiences by influencing how we perceive the environment as it is situated physically, intellectually and affectively, and papers explored theories and models of space and place in art, design, craft, architecture and other visual forms of communication. Click here to view the Symposium program .

The 43rd Annual Academic Symposium: Everyday Practices

Friday, May 4, 2018 | Flying A Studios Room, University Center (UCen) | 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM

Vashti DuBois, Founder and Executive Director, The Colored Girls Museum, gave the keynote address. The theme argued that when art and architectural historians overlook the everyday in favor of grand and canonical narratives, the significance of the ordinary is often lost. This symposium aimed to reclaim the nuance and allusive nature of everyday life by addressing the mundane, the vernacular, the mass-disseminated, and other ordinary narratives.

The 42nd Annual Academic Symposium: Poor Taste and the Exclusionary Mechanisms of Cultural Consumption

Friday, April 28, 2017 | Multicultural Center Theater and Lounge | 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Keynote Speaker was LA-based artist and curator Mark Steven Greenfield. The symposium aimed to facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion on the ways in which taste includes and excludes across a diverse set of historical, cultural and political contexts. Click here to view the Symposium program .

The 41st Annual Academic Symposium: Radical Ephemeralities

Friday, April 22, 2016 | Davidson Library, Room 1312 | 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM

The keynote address was from Homay King, Bryn Mawr College, SUNY Stonybrook. The symposium asked scholars and artists to address: how the concept of ephemerality might be analyzed in different historical and political contexts, how can ephemera be recovered or preserved, how has (art) historical inquiry shifted in response to changes in both the accessibility and nature of data, and how have our disciplines adapted to diminishing attention spans and/or the need for interactivity. Click here to view the Symposium program .