People
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)
Areas of Concentration: Colonial architecture of Western India, Architecture of the Indian Ocean region, Architectural education
Faculty Advisor: Swati Chattopadhyay
Areas of Concentration: twentieth-century Chinese architecture and urbanism; historiography of Chinese architectural history; vernacular architecture; heritage preservation
Faculty Advisor: Swati Chattopadhyay
M.Eng. Thesis: “‘明长城防御体系’再思——以辽东镇东部沿边堡城为例” (“Rethinking the Ming Great Wall Defense System: The Border Fortresses in Eastern Liaodong,” School of Architecture, Southeast University, Nanjing, completed 2020)
Areas of Concentration: Repatriation, restitution, museum practice, Native American art and Indigenous cultural patrimony
Faculty Advisor: Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie
M.A. Thesis: "Identity Crisis: Jimmie Durham, Authenticity, and Sovereignty" (Art & Art History, Stanford University, completed 2019)
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)
Areas of Concentration: Twentieth-Century Architecture in California; Architecture of the Iranian diaspora in Southern California; Modern and Contemporary Iranian Architecture
Faculty Advisor: Volker M. Welter
Committee Members: Jenni Sorkin, Talinn Grigor (Art History, UC Davis)
Dissertation: "Persomania, Persophobia, Persophilia: A Century of Self-Fashioning with “Persian Architecture” and Its Reception in California"
M.Arch. Thesis: “Disappearing Lives: The Material Culture of Sarā-ye Moshir” (McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada, completed 2013)
M.L.Arch. Thesis: “The Eternal Landscapes” (Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran, completed 2007)
Areas of Concentration: Early modern collecting; history of museums; museum ethics
M.A. Thesis: "Church as Museum, Spolia as Artifact: Reuse in Roman Churches ca. 300-1200" (Cornell University, completed 2023)
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 (Urban Studies and Planning, UC San Diego)
Dissertation: "The Domesticated Landscape of War: Army Family Housing, Settler Belonging and Environmental Toxicity in the United States"
M.A. Thesis: "Dreamscapes of Domestic Fantasy: Advertising 1970s Interiors" (University of Brighton, completed 2016)
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: Constance Penley
Committee Members: Mark Meadow, Jenn Tyburczy (Feminist Studies) and Andy Campbell (Critical Studies | Roski MA Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere, USC).
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, completed 2020)
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 Amsterdam: The Printed Images of Johan Nieuhof’s Remarkable Voyages and Travels to the 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)
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)
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
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)
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)
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)
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)
Areas of Concentration: Ancient Greek and Roman artwork, Ancient Roman burial and funerary practices, ancient cults, mythology, witchcraft, magic, human remains in museums, NAGPRA and museum practices
Faculty Advisor: Claudia Moser
Committee Members: María Lumbreras, Christine Thomas (Religious Studies), Stuart McKie (University of Exeter, United Kingdom)
Dissertation: "Ars Contra Naturam: The Liminal Magic of Death in Antiquity"
M.A. Thesis: "I Sing the Body Magical: Baubo and Her Apotropaic Power," completed 2020
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)
Areas of Concentration: Song- and Yuan-dynasty Chinese Painting
Faculty Advisor: Peter Sturman
M.Phil. Thesis: "The Representation of Filial Piety in the Yuan-Dynasty Handscroll Four Stories of Filial Piety” (The University of Hong Kong, completed 2023)
Areas of Concentration: Modern German religious architecture, Historic preservation, Landscape studies
Faculty Advisor: Volker M. Welter
Committee Members: Richard Wittman, Mark Edward Ruff (History, Saint Louis University)
Dissertation: "Building Catholic Modernity: Religion, Community, and Architecture in Cologne, 1919-60"
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
Area of Concentration: Early modern Netherlandish jewels and jewelry
Faculty Advisor: Mark A. Meadow
M.A. Thesis: "‘Wat men veerst haelt, dat smaeket soetst’: De pomander en de wisselwerking met buiten-Europese culturen" (History, Art History and Classics, Radboud University, completed 2024)
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: "Clay Bodies: Figurative Ceramics and the Crafting of Identity in Postwar Sculpture"
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)
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)
Dissertation: "Photography, Pictograms, and Pedagogy: The Worker in Weimar Art and Visual Culture, 1919-1933"
M.A. Thesis: "Deconstructing the War Monument, Redefining the War Hero: Antimilitarism in Berlin Dada, 1920" (The Courtauld Institute of Art, completed 2018)
Areas of Concentration: Eighteenth and Nineteenth-century European Architecture and Public Spaces; History of the Mediterranean; Mechanically Reproducible Mediums; Greco-Roman Reception
Faculty Advisor: Richard Wittman
M.Litt Thesis: "Roman Holiday: Constructions of National Identities in John Shaw Smith’s Environs of Rome" (University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Scotland, completed 2023)
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)
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
Areas of Concentration: Medieval Mediterranean; British Empire, Visual & Material Culture, Landscape, Foodways
Faculty Advisor: Swati Chattopadhyay
Committee Members: María Lumbreras, Erika Rappaport (Department of History, UCSB), Romita Ray (Department of Art and Music Histories, Syracuse University)
Dissertation Title: "Social Clubs, Country Clubs and the Making of the Colonial Landscape in India, 1820s to 1960s"
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)
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)
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; Artists' Homes, Studios, and Gardens; Exhibition Histories
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)
Areas of Concentration: 18th and 19th century European architectural history and theory; monuments and public space; ephemeral architecture; urbanism
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)
Areas of Concentration: Modern and contemporary art; 20th & 21st century art magazines; feminisms and intersectionality; arts publishing; alternative art sites; collaborative art practices; photography; theories of gender, memory, and the archive; arts education and pedagogies
Faculty Advisor: Jenni Sorkin
M.A. Thesis: “Chrysalis: a magazine of women’s culture, the magazine as medium, and as catalyst for feminist thinking” (The Courtauld Institute of Art, completed 2016)
Areas of Concentration: Intermedial studies in Chinese painting and calligraphy; literati painting of the 13th and 14th centuries; materiality, material culture, and technical history
Faculty Advisor: Peter Sturman
M.A. Thesis: "The Social and the Ritual: Reconsidering Ni Zan’s Painting and Inscription” (The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, completed 2020)