Announcements for our Department Graduate Alumni
Has your contact information recently changed? Do you have news to share? Please use this short form to let us know.
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..
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) .