People

Graduate Students

Alec Aldrich
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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)

Dhaval Chauhan
  • Graduate Student

Areas of Concentration: Colonial architecture of Western India, Architecture of the Indian Ocean region, Architectural education
Faculty Advisor: Swati Chattopadhyay

Jiaqi Chen | 陈加麒
  • He/Him/His
  • Graduate Student

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)

A headshot of Reilly Clark on the beach
  • He/Him/His
  • Graduate Student

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)

Letícia Cobra Lima
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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)

Ali Derafshi
  • He/Him/His
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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)

Robyn Epstein
  • Graduate Student

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)

Sylvia Faichney
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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)

Graham Feyl
  • 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: 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)

Emma Gagnon
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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)

Anahit Galstyan
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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)

Sophia Gimenez
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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

Felicity Good
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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)

Claudia Grego March
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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)

Leslie Huang
  • 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)

Alida Jekabson
  • 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)

Victoria Jennings
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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

Hannah Kagan-Moore
  • She/Her/Hers/They/Them/Their
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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)

Annie Liu
  • Graduate Student

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)

Alexander Luckmann
  • He/Him/His
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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

A head shot of Jasper Martens
  • He/Him/His
  • Graduate Student

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)

 

Sara Morris
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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)

Iman Salty
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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)

Elizabeth Saubestre standing within Chris Burden's "Urban Light" currently on public view in the Smidt Welcome Plaza, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Graduate Student

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)

Betty Schlothan
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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)

Nathan Segura
  • 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

Nisha Shanghavi
  • Graduate Student

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)

Megan Sheard
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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)

Elizabeth Driscoll Smith
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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)

A reflection of the Eiffel Tower in the west facade of the Grand Palais Éphémère
  • Ph.D. Candidate

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)

A headshot of Kristin Yinger
  • She/Her/Hers
  • Graduate Student

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)

A headshot of Shelly Zhang
  • Graduate Student

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)