Joseph Shaikewitz

PhD Candidate

Areas of interest: Modern art; North and South America; gender and sexuality studies; trans visual culture.

Joseph Shaikewitz is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, specializing in twentieth-century art, performance studies, and feminist, queer, and trans theory. They are broadly interested in modernist studies, historiography, sexual politics, and irreparability.

Their dissertation, “Un-Imaginable: Travesti Visualities in Latin America, 1900–1960,” theorizes the (in)capacity of the visual field as a site of trans femme emergence. Drawing on little-studied artworks and medical, carceral, and vernacular archives, this project surfaces how conditions of looking, recognition, and representation have delimited—while also failing to contain—gender difference and its possibilities of flourishing.

Joseph’s research has been supported by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art; Tinker Foundation; Stanford Humanities Center; and LGBT Studies at Yale University, where they were a 2023–24 Sarah Pettit Doctoral Fellow. Their writing is forthcoming in the exhibition catalogue The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869–1930 (Phaidon, 2025) and the multi-volume anthology A Cultural History of Trans Lives (Routledge, 2028).