PhD Students
Current students in the PhD program
Talia Abrahams
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Arts of Africa with a focus on apartheid era South Africa; sound theory and multisensory methodological approaches.
Mojgan Aghaei Meybodi
PhD Student
Areas of interest: History of Architecture, Material Culture, and Urban Planning; Cross-cultural Exchange; History of Collections; Digital Humanities in Architecture History and Archaeology; Historic Preservation and Adaptive Reuse; Modern Art.
Cristina Aldrich
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Medieval art, especially from the Iberian Peninsula, Marian devotion, polychrome wooden sculpture, pilgrimage, history of collections.
Samuel Allen
PhD Student
Areas of interest: History of photography; American art, nationalism and empire; labor history; sexuality and gender.
Sophia Bevacqua
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Architecture and works on paper in the European colonial period; the advent of drawing as a practice and medium; connections between architectural style, histories of science, and racial identity.
Quinn R. Bolte
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Art history and Archaeology of the late antique-Medieval Eastern Mediterranean Interests: Material-focused studies; craft and production; women in late antiquity; object movement and experience.
Christine Bootes
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Modern and contemporary art; history of photography; internationalisms; empire; critical historiography; cultural heritage.
Doug Braun
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Ancient Greek art and archaeology; human-animal relations in art; natural history and philosophy; ornamentation and display in the ancient world.
Bentley Brown
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Contemporary Art with a special focus on Black artists and Black creative spaces within New York City’s contemporary art movements of the late 1960s through the mid-1980s, Postwar American Abstract and Figurative Expressionism, and Contemporary Photography of the African Diaspora with concentration on images of segregation and Black identity.
Shiro Burnette
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Egyptian, Nubian, Greek, and Roman religious art and architecture, Eco-critical approaches to art history, Archaeobotany, Topography and Social Histories, Museum Curation and Interpretation.
Josephine D. Chase
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Areas of interest: Art and visual culture of the African Diaspora, histories of photography in West and Central Africa, African American art historiographies, Black life and the archive.
Yunhao Chen
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Buddhist art and material culture in medieval China; art in the contact zone; place and space; mural paintings; materiality and crafting.
Salih Cholakkalakath
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Islamic and South Asian Art and Architecture; Material and Visual Histories of the Indian Ocean; Malabar and Lakshadweep; Manuscripts and Qurʾāns; Codicology; Transregional Visualities of Talismanic Images; Material Histories of Protection and Healing; Tombstones and Cenotaphs.
Katherine Cohen
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Ancient Greek archaeology, craft production (especially ceramics), history of technology, archaeological theory and the (pre)history of archaeological practice
Annie Correll
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Northern European art, 1400 - 1700; materiality; temporality; frames and parerga; cross-cultural and cross-material exchanges.
Mason Cummings
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Euro-American art and visual culture of the long nineteenth century; history of art history; philosophical aesthetics; history of science/medicine.
Claire Davis
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Imperial Roman and Late Antique floor mosaics; experiential analysis, materiality, and arts’ agency applied to Greco-Roman visual and material culture; approaches to legacy excavation archives.
Zhilong Deng
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Ink Painting and Art Making.
Fangjie Deng
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Chinese Painting from the 10th to the 14th Century, Chinese Landscape Painting, Technique of Chinese Ink Painting, Visual Art of Medieval China.
Brandon Eng
PhD Student
Areas of interest: 20th century American Art including art and economics, labor history, public art, performance, and post-war architecture and urban planning.
Megan Gatton
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Early Iron Age and Archaic Mediterranean world; archaeology of sacred contexts; ancient craft traditions and communities of practice; history of archaeology; zooarchaeology and environmental archaeology.
Helina Gebremedhen
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Medieval African and Islamic art; Red Sea/Indian Ocean networks (including talismanic and magical sciences); Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa; historiography and museums.
Luis Guevara-Flores
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Indigenous Arts of the Americas; Latin America; Nahuatl; post-Revolutionary Mexico; Museum curation; Performance art.
Kinaya Hassane
PhD Student
Areas of interest: 19th and 20th century visual culture of western Indian Ocean islands; arts of Africa; photography; migration and mobility; histories of decolonization.
Phoebe Herland
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Post war British and American art, with a special interest in artistic exchange between London and Los Angeles.
Madison Hummer
PhD Student
Areas of interest: European long nineteenth century; visual culture in early modern to modern Europe; phenomenology; art, object and the body.
Peter Moore Johnson
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Ancient Egyptian and Nubian Art & Archaeology; Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Greater Mediterranean during the First Millennium BCE; Identity in the Ancient World; Reception Studies and Historiography of Antiquity; Digital Humanities in Archaeology & Art History.
Kolleen Ku
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Twentieth-century art, art of the Asian diaspora, feminist and queer approaches.
So Jeong Lee
PhD Student
Areas of interest: South Asian Art; Islamic Art.
Jinyi Liu
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Late Imperial Chinese art and material culture; early modern global trade; craft knowledge.
Corey Loftus
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Modern Art, History of Photography, Latin American Art, Feminist, Queer, & Crip studies, Philosophies of Embodiment, Historic Preservation.
Hannah Loughlin
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Greco-Roman Art History; Copying, Appropriation, and Making; Indo-Roman Trade.
Emma Lyandres
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Visual and material culture of early modern Italy; Renaissance perceptions of Jerusalem; Jewish ceremonial art, especially textiles; artistic, cultural, and intellectual exchanges in sixteenth-century Mediterranean.
Khaled Malas
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Islamic Art and Architecture. Buildings and their representations; design-as-research; histories and theories of art, architecture, urbanism, magic, and medicine. The production, circulation, and consumption of efficacious images.
Noah Margulis
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Renaissance and Baroque Art of Southern Europe; print culture, the graphic arts, media, and materiality; landscape and the environmental humanities; antiquarianism and historiography.
Megija Milberga
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Modern and contemporary art in Eastern Europe; architecture and urban planning in the Soviet Union, with a special interest in the Baltic States.
Desiree S. Mitton
PhD Student
Area of interest: Postwar American Art.
Elyse Nelson
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Eighteenth and nineteenth-century European painting and sculpture; neoclassicism; Antonio Canova’s late career and British patrons.
Selin Ozulkulu
PhD Student
Areas of interest: 18th- and 19th-century cross-cultural contact between Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean; Orientalism(s); Imperial/National self-fashioning; Artistic self-representations.
Sehyun Park
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Ceramic production in thirteenth- to fourteenth-century China.
Juan Gabriel Ramírez Bolívar
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Latin American Art of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries; Artistic Exchanges Between Europe and the Hemispheric Americas; Global History of Art.
Lauren Rooney
PhD Student
Areas of interest: European art, 18th century–20th century; history of aesthetics; aesthetic discourses of the Enlightenment.
Shannah Rose
PhD Student
Areas of interest: colonial Mexican manuscripts; print culture in the Spanish Americas, Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula; history of the book; codicology; translation studies; collecting history.
Rebecca A. Salem
Areas of interest: Ancient Greek art and architecture; Architectural history and theory; Archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean; 3D modeling; Cultural heritage; temporality.
Joseph Shaikewitz
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Modern art; Latin America and the Caribbean; feminist, queer, and trans studies; history of photography.
Jasmine Smith
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Ancient Egyptian Art & Archaeology; Digital Humanities; conceptions of creativity and innovation in tomb decoration; expressions of individuality in the Ancient World; cultural and religious entanglement.
Tyler C. Spencer
PhD Student
Area of interest: Art of the United States; History of Photography; Indigenous Americas; Environmental Humanities.
Ankita Srivastava
PhD Student
Area of interest: Early Modern South Asian art, Early Modern European art, Early Photography.
Graham Stopa
PhD Student
Area of interest: Art and architecture of Africa.
Noah Stevens-Stein
PhD Student
Area of interest: Titian; portraiture; cultural interaction and mobility between Italy and the world.
Scarlett H. Strauss
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Medieval and Renaissance Italy, especially sacred paintings; anthropologies of ritual, materiality, metapictoriality, performance theory, phenomenology, social history, technical art history, visuality.
Peter A. Thompson
PhD Student
Areas of Interest: Ancient Greek art and archaeology; archaism in ancient art and architecture; constructions of the past; archaeology and photography/cinema; history of museums.
Jennifer Todaro
PhD Student
Area of interest: Ancient Egyptian and Nubian tattoos, body modifications, and adornments.
Keda Wang
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Architectural history, scale and miniatures, spatial perceptions, East Asia and Southeast Asia, late medieval to early modern periods.
Lijie Wang
PhD Student
Areas of interest: Global Pop art, toy culture, cultures of childhood, and the aesthetics of cuteness; gender and performance art; scale in modern and contemporary art.
Tong Xue
PhD Student
Area of interest: Medieval Chinese art, with a focus on funerary art in the 5th-7th centuries Southern tombs.
Emma Yujia
PhD Student
Area of interest: Chinese paintings.
Yi Zhu
PhD Student
Area of interest: Medieval Chinese art and archaeology; material culture, especially ceramics; cross-cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean world.