Announcements for our Department Graduate Alumni

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Following California Governor Gavin Newsom's Executive Order N-1-24 directing the removal of homeless encampments on state land, Ben Jameson-Ellsmore (Ph.D. 2023) reflects on the implications of such a directive. In “The Housing Crisis and Newsomville 2024 ,” published on PLATFORM, Jameson-Ellsmore directs the reader to a selection of articles published in PLATFORM, including two of his own, which helps place this policy shift in historical context.

“Robert Frank and Todd Webb: Across America, 1955,” a traveling exhibition curated by Lisa Volpe (Ph.D. 2013), was reviewed by The Washington Post , calling it "superb" and its accompanying catalogue "excellent."

Diva Zumaya (Ph.D. 2018) has been appointed Associate Curator of European Art at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. She will join the Huntington on June 3, 2024.

Seokwon Choi (Ph.D. 2016) has been serving as an assistant professor in the Department of Oriental Painting at the College of Fine Arts , Seoul National University, since February 2022.

Sophia Quach McCabe (Ph.D. 2019) co-curated the multi-media art exhibition Positive Exposure: Southern California Asian American Art , currently on view at TAG Gallery, Los Angeles (May 4–24). The exhibition shines a spotlight on numerous UC Santa Barbara student and alumni artists and offers a nuanced presentation of the diverse and intergenerational voices within the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) artistic community.

Denise Amy Baxter (M.A. 1998, Ph.D. 2003) is Professor of Art History and Associate Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School at the University of North Texas and has recently begun her term as President of the College Art Association.

Sarah Watson Parsons (Ph.D. 2000) has two collaborative projects launching this month: the print edition of her co-authored book, Photography in Canada, 1839 – 1989: An Illustrated History and an exhibition, Hypervisibility: Early Photography and Privacy in North America, 1839–1900 . Both the exhibition and a recent article in History of Photography, “Victorian Facebooks: Privacy Concerns at William Notman’s Studio ," were undertaken in collaboration with doctoral students as part of an ongoing research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Ellen C. Caldwell (M.A. 2006) co-edited and contributed to the forthcoming volume Gender Violence, Art, and the Viewer: An Intervention coming out on September 17th with Pennsylvania State University Press. The volume explores gender violence in art, proposing ways of intervening on often-revered works of violence, and is particularly relevant for art history students, educators, and curators.

Ginny Reynolds Badgett (Ph.D. 2021) co-curated with Dr. Makeda Best the exhibition Framing Freedom: The Harriet Hayden Albums at the Boston Athenaeum through June 22, 2024. Ginny works for The Curtis Group , a Virginia-based nonprofit fundraising consulting firm and serves on the Giving USA Editorial Review Board, which provides oversight to the editor and authors of the Giving USA: The Annual Report on Philanthropy , the longest running most comprehensive report on philanthropy. Ginny and her husband James, welcomed their daughter, Mattox Elizabeth, a year ago in March 2023.

Nancy Clare Caponi (M.A. 2002) is actively involved in the effort to save her Master’s thesis project, Greenwood Pond: Double Site, by land artist Mary Miss, from demolition by the Des Moines Art Center.  Working with lead agency The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Caponi wrote letters to museum and city officials documenting the importance of this interactive sculptural installation that encircles a beautiful urban wetlands setting.  Due to input from art historians and design professionals, a Federal Judge has issued a temporary restraining order to halt the deconstruction of Greenwood Pond: Double Site.

Hans J. Van Miegroet (Ph.D. 1988) passed away suddenly on February 9, 2024. He taught in the Art, Art History and Visual Studies Department at Duke University .

Mira Rai Waits (Ph.D. 2014) has authored the essay, "The Prison as Tourist Site ," on PLATFORM , April 15, 2024.

Amara Solari (Ph.D. 2007), Professor of Art History and Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, has received a Guggenheim Foundation Award .

Sarah Bane (Ph.D. 2022) was recently hired as the Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum, University of Texas, Austin. She began in April 2024 after completing her position as the Hoehn Curatorial Fellow for Prints at the University of San Diego.

Elizabeth Aguilera (Ph.D. 2020), along with Emily Umberger, co-authored the chapter "Coyolxauhqui’s Serpents: Political Metaphors in Mexica-Aztec Sculptures" in Birds and Beasts of Ancient Mesoamerica: Animal Symbolism in the Postclassic Period , edited by Susan Milbrath and Elizabeth Baquedano (University Press of Colorado, 2023).

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.

Matthew Limb (Ph.D. 2023) participated in a virtual discussion "The Hotter and Gayer Narrative in Ceramics " with Beth Ann Gerstein and Pam Aliaga, co-curators of the exhibition Making in Between: Queer Clay at the American Museum of Ceramic Art. “The Hotterand Gayer Narrative in Ceramics” furthers the dialogue on queer ceramics history and delves deeper into Making in Between: Queer Clay, the second exhibition in AMOCA’s “Making in Between” series. Matthew wrote the introductory essay for the Queer Clay catalog, defining identity in ceramics and explaining how it fundamentally evades the limitations of categorization. Through this Zoom event, Matthew explores how queer identity plays a role in the clay community.

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.

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) .