Talia Andrei

Japanese art; Momoyama-Edo period painting; narrative painting; Buddhist art

Talia is a fourth-year PhD student in Japanese art history. Her dissertation will investigate the appearance of shaji sankei mandara (shrine-temple pilgrimage mandalas) in late-medieval Japan. In particular, the juxtaposition of sacred and secular spaces, the representation of devotional practice and the context of perception for sankei mandara, viewed as they were in groups with a narrator performing before them. Talia graduated from Rutgers College with high honors in Art History. Her Columbia M.A. paper was entitled "Enlightenment According to Zen: Collapsing the Triptych in Mokuan's Four Sleepers".

Heidi Applegate

Nineteenth-Century American Art, World's Fairs

Heidi Applegate received a B.A. in Russian from Haverford College (1993), and an M.A. in Art History from the University of Maryland (2001). She was the curatorial assistant for American and British Paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC before beginning the Ph.D. program at Columbia in 2002. Her dissertation considers the ways in which the installation and interpretive practices of the fine arts exhibition at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition attempted to make modern art accessible to a mass audience. Funding for her research has included a CASVA Predoctoral Fellowship for Travel Abroad for Historians of American Art, a Wyeth Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art.

Jessica Basciano

Nineteenth-century architecture; French art and culture; historiography; and the intersection of architecture, politics, and religion

Jessica Basciano is completing her dissertation titled "Architecture and Popular Religion: French Pilgrimage Churches of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries." She presented "La politique de l'archéologie chrétienne et la basilique Saint-Martin de Tours par Victor Laloux" at the conference Victor Laloux: un architecte dans sa ville, in Tours, France in 2009. Publication of the proceedings is forthcoming. Her research has been funded by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Lurcy Charitable Trust, and the Whiting Foundation. She holds a B.F.A. from Queen's University in Kingston and an M.A. in Art History from the University of Western Ontario.

Caitlin Beach

American art and architecture; urbanism and landscape theory; nineteenth-century visual culture

Caitlin earned a B.A. in art history and history from Bowdoin College in 2010, where she wrote an honors thesis on masculinity and work ethic in George Bellows' paintings of Maine shipbuilding. She has held internships in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the Education Department of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Research interests include the relation between nostalgia and place in American art, the Ashcan School, and civic identity and commemoration in nineteenth-century visual culture.

Marta Becherini

South Asian Art and Architecture

Marta Becherini studied Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Venice, receiving her B.A. in Hindi from Ca' Foscari University in 2005. Prior to beginning her graduate studies at Columbia University, she spent two years working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, first as an intern and then as research assistant in the Department of Asian Art. In 2008 she received her M.A. degree from Columbia University with a paper focusing on the cross-cultural dimension of the murals decorating a medieval Buddhist monastic complex in Ladakh. Her research interests include the issue of patronage in North Indian painting, particularly with regard to sub-imperial Mughal painting, the relationship between early Indo-Islamic architecture and the architectural traditions of Iran and Central Asia, and cultural and artistic exchanges between Europe and South Asia in early modern times.

Emily Beeny

Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Painting, Nineteenth-Century European Art, Dance, Gesture, Embodiment

Emily received her BA, MA, and MPhil in art history from Columbia. Her dissertation, Poussin and the Dance: Body and Language in Seventeenth-Century France, explores the relationship between Classical French painting and court ballet. She has published essays on Luc-Olivier Merson (in L'Étrange Monsieur Merson, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, 2008), Jean-Léon Gérôme (in Reconsidering Gérôme, Getty Publications, 2010), and Louis-Léopold Boilly (in Louis-Léopold Boilly, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lilles, 2011) and has contributed entries on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French works to a forthcoming catalogue of paintings in the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Kim Benzel

Ancient Near Eastern art, archaeology and art theory

Ph.D. candidate, Columbia University
M.Phil. 1993, Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
M.A. 1991, Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
B.A. 1985, Political Science, Brown University
Kim's areas of interest are in ancient Near Eastern art and archaeology and in art theory. She works full-time as an Associate Curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She has helped produced numerous special exhibitions there, including: The Royal City of Susa (1992), Assyrian Origins (1995), Art and Empire (1995), and Beyond Babylon (2008). As part of her professional responsibilities, Kim participates in Museum-sponsored excavations—most recently at the site of Umm el-Marra in Syria. Her dissertation examines the rich assemblages of burial jewelry discovered in the so-called Royal Cemetery at Ur in southern Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), particularly in terms of how the various pieces were made. Her study shows that the techniques of manufacture used were highly repetitive and seemingly prescribed—performative aspects that play out in the imagery of the jewelry as well. She concludes that the ornaments materialized from their creation as a group of ritually charged objects, illustrating that technology can carry meaning in the same way that iconography does.

Gale Berninghausen

South Asian Art and Architecture

Gale received her B.A. in Art History from Middlebury College (Vermont) in 2005. Thereafter, she worked for the Indian and Southeast Asian Department at Sotheby's here in New York. In late 2007, she moved to Mumbai where she consulted for Pundole Art Gallery and managed Bombay Art Gallery, in addition to conducting extensive research travel throughout South India, Sri Lanka and China. During 2009 she curated an exhibition of Mughal and dasvatara ganjifa (playing cards) at Middlebury College. Subsequently, Gale managed the East Asian Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University from 2010-2011. Here at Columbia, Gale is pursuing a variety of interests in South Asian painting, sculpture and architecture, as well as a minor in Chinese painting. Gale is currently studying Hindi and Urdu languages, and is highly proficient in Spanish.

Katherine Morris Boivin

Medieval Art and Architecture, Islamic Art and Architecture

Katherine Morris Boivin is a PhD candidate specializing in German Gothic art and architecture. Her dissertation on St. Jakob in Rothenburg ob der Tauber explores the potential for architectural form to carry meaning through association with devotional use and urban context. Publications include "Villard Bound and Unbounded," in: AVISTA, Vol. 18, No. 1/2, 2008 and "Der Lettner in Gelnhausen," in: Gelnhäuser Geschichtsblätter, 2007. She received her B.A. from Tufts University (2006) and her M.A. and MPhil from Columbia University (2008, 2009). She lectures at The Cloisters Museum and leads historic tours of New York City. Other research interests include Islamic art and architecture and cross-cultural notions of sacrality.

Emerson Bowyer

Nineteenth-century visual culture; art and technology; law and the image; histories of paperwork and bureaucracy

Emerson is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Frick Collection, New York. There he will complete his dissertation, "Numismatic Modernity: Economies of Representation in France, 1800-1840," which pursues the pre-history of our current financial "crisis." It considers the production and consumption of medals, monuments, and monetary objects in a period driven by—seemingly antagonistic—experiences of heightened historical consciousness, on the one hand, and the future-oriented abstractions of speculative finance, on the other.

Recent publications include "Monographic Impressions," in Reconsidering Gérôme (Scott Allan and Mary Morton, eds., Getty Publications, 2010), and a review of Victor Stoichita's The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock (Visual Resources 26:2 [2010]). Emerson is also the editor of a forthcoming special issue of Grey Room, focused on nineteenth-century technologies of reproduction. He holds a B.A. and a law degree from the University of Sydney, Australia.

Rachel Boyd

Italian Renaissance Art and Architecture; 18th- and 19th-Century Italian Architecture and Landscape

Rachel is a first-year PhD candidate studying Italian Renaissance art and architecture. She earned her M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge in 2010, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. At Cambridge, she wrote her dissertation on a nineteenth-century Roman villa, and her studies focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italian and British architecture and landscape architecture; she maintains an active interest in this field. Rachel earned her B.A. from Yale University in 2009, where she double-majored in the history of art and Italian. She has held internships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Robert Lehman Collection), the Yale University Art Gallery and the Frick Collection, and most recently worked at a boutique litigation firm in New York City.

Lorenzo Buonanno

Italian Renaissance Art; Painting and Sculpture of Venice; Interaction between Painters and Sculptors; Roman Art

Lorenzo is a fourth-year graduate student currently working on a dissertation examining the role of relief sculpture in the development of early Renaissance art in Venice and the Veneto. He received M.A. degrees from Middlebury College and from Columbia University. He has presented papers at the annual meetings of the Renaissance Society of America (April, 2010), the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo (May, 2007), and the Incontri in onore di Michelangelo Muraro in Sossano, Italy (May, 2009). Lorenzo serves as Assistant to the Director of the Columbia University Program in Venice, and as Co-student Coordinator of the New York Renaissance Consortium.

Colby Chamberlain

Modern and Contemporary Art

Colby Chamberlain is a Jacob K. Javits Fellow, a senior editor for the online magazine Triple Canopy, and a contributor to Artforum and Cabinet. He is currently a 2011-2012 Helena Rubinstein Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Anne Hunnell Chen

Late Antiquity, Roman Provincial Art and Archaeology, Byzantine Art and Architecture, Sasanian Art and Architecture, Intercultural Exchange

Anne Hunnell Chen studies the art and architecture of the Roman Empire, with a particular focus on Late Antiquity. Her dissertation, The Politics of Family: Familial References in Tetrarchic Architecture and Iconography explores the late 3rd century Tetrarchic emperors' strategic use of references to fictive and earthly family in official ideology. She has excavated at the Roman Baths in Iesso (Spain) and at the palace of emperor Galerius at Felix Romuliana (Serbia). Her B.A. degree was earned from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fields of Art History and Classical Studies.

Joshua Cohen

African/European exchanges in 20th century art, especially Fauvism, Cubism, and Senegalese and South African modernisms; independence-era staged performance, namely Fodéba Keita, Les Ballets Africains, and nationalization of traditional arts in Guinea and Senegal; masks and masquerade; sculptural and musical aesthetics; theorizations of cross-cultural encounter in and beyond postcolonial studies; painting and photography in contemporary Africa and the diaspora; museum studies; meta-criticism

I majored in English at Vassar College and arrived at African art by way of interests in music and dance. An apprenticeship with percussionist Mamadouba 'Mohamed' Camara in New York and involvement with Guinean arts in the Bay Area prepared me for Conakry-based Fulbright research in 2003–04. In fall of 2007 I entered coursework and in 2010 began work on a dissertation examining African/European encounters 20th-century art. I am also pursuing projects on Fodéba Keita and his Ballets Africains (eventually the ballet national de Guinée), contemporary photographic portraiture, and integration of exhibition and performance as a new means of engaging the arts and history of West Africa.

Sandrine Colard

African, African diasporic, European modern and contemporary art, photography

Sandrine Colard is a 3rd-year PhD student. She studies African, African diasporic and European modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on photography.

She received a First Prize Diploma of Violin from the Royal Conservatory of Belgium (2000), a B.A. in English and Spanish Literatures from the Free University of Brussels (2005), and an M.A. in Africana Studies from NYU (2007). Her interests are visual culture, film, colonialism and post-colonialism in the arts.

Sonia Coman

18th century early modern art in France; printmaking and interpretative prints; the history of collecting

Sonia Coman is a first-year Ph.D. candidate studying 18th century French art. Sonia graduated from Harvard College in May 2011, having written an honors senior thesis on authorial ambition and the original-copy paradigm in the compendium of prints known as the Recueil Jullienne. Sonia worked as a student docent for the Harvard Art Museum and as a curatorial intern in the Department of Paintings at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Sonia's areas of interest include collecting practices in France in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly related to prints, and representations of theater in early modern drawings and paintings.

Jessamyn Abigail Schafer Conrad

Jessamyn received her BA in Art History and Social Anthropology from Harvard, and her MPhil in Historical Studies from Cambridge University. Her undergraduate thesis analyzed the spatial systems of the three Muslim Harams and her Cambridge thesis was the first comprehensive study of the collection of Islamic art currently held in the Bargello Museum in Florence. Her dissertation focuses on five trecento altarpieces made for the Cathedral in Siena, and more specifically on issues of depicted narration, space, and time. She currently teaches literature in Columbia's Core Curriculum, consults at the writing center, and is working on her second trade non-fiction book.

Emily Margaret Cook

Republican and early imperial Roman art and archaeology; Etruscan and Italic art and archaeology; ancient painting

Emily is a second year student in the PhD program studying ancient art with a focus in Italian and Roman art and archaeology. She is a Jacob K. Javits fellow and has received the Waldbaum scholarship from the AIA for participation in an archaeological field school, which enabled her to participate in Columbia's field project at the Villa San Marco (Italy). Emily earned a B.A. in Classics and the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University in 2009 where her undergraduate senior honors thesis focused on the context and decoration of the domestic baths in Pompeii. She has worked as a volunteer and Curatorial Assistant at the Johns Hopkins University Archaeological Collection. In the Spring of 2009 Emily received the Robert and Nancy Hall Fellowship and worked in the Renaissance and Baroque Art curatorial department of the Walters Art Museum.

Lindsay Cook

Romanesque and Gothic Architecture and Urbanism; Restoration of Medieval European Buildings

Lindsay earned a B.A. in 2010 from Vassar College, where she majored in Art History and French. Benefitting from two consecutive summers in the field as a QuickTime VR photographer for Mapping Gothic France, she hopes to focus on French Gothic architecture and urbanism, as well as theories and technical aspects of architectural restoration.

Lindsay also has a background studying modern architecture, which informs her understanding of the transformative power of architectural space. She wrote her undergraduate thesis about plans for a new chapel at Vassar in the 1950s, including one proposal by Philip Johnson, and she worked for two summers at Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House. Before entering the PhD program at Columbia, Lindsay worked on a public sculpture database for the Chicago Park District and interned at the Alliance Française de Chicago, where she helped with the 2011 French Decorative Arts Symposium.

Carrie Cushman

Japanese Modern Art and Architecture

Carrie Cushman is a first year PhD student in the History of Art and Archaeology Department interested in issues of originality and tradition in post-war Japanese architectural discourse and practice. Her undergraduate honors thesis focused on the exhibition house and garden, Shōfusō (originally exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1954), as a means of examining the role of the traditional Japanese vernacular within Modern architectural practice and discourse in the West.

Sophia D'Addio

Italian Renaissance Art and Architecture; Interactions between Art and Music; Nineteenth-Century Reception of the Renaissance

Sophia graduated from Colgate University with a BA in Creative Writing and Medieval & Renaissance Studies. Thereafter she earned an MA in Italian from Middlebury College, in conjunction with the Universitá degli Studi di Firenze; her thesis entitled "Il valore, la funzione, e la potenza dell'immagine: Iconografie domenicane e francescane negli affreschi del Trecento" compared two Trecento fresco cycles respectively located in the convents of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce in Florence. An avid musician, she then went on to complete an MA in Violin and Viola Performance at Queens College, where she also studied Renaissance mensural notation and early Baroque performance practice, culminating in a production of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo. She received a third MA in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania, with a thesis examining the political implications of Charles V's encounter with the Concistoro Frescoes of Domenico Beccafumi in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena.

Catherine Damman

Modern and Contemporary Art

Catherine is a first year PhD student studying postwar American and European art. Her research explores the strategies of conceptualist practice in the 1960s and 1970s, with an emphasis on issues of spectatorship, performance, and display. Catherine holds a B.A. in Art History and Philosophy from Loyola Marymount University.

Michaela de Lacaze

Latin American Modern and Contemporary art

Michaela de Lacaze, a second-year student, studies Latin American Modern and Contemporary art and is particularly interested in Brazilian and Argentinean art of the postwar period. She received her B.A. in History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University in 2007. She has worked at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire

Art of the United States; Nineteenth-century European and American Art; and Prints, Photography, Works on Paper

Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire is a PhD candidate working on nineteenth-century American art. Her dissertation titled "Art in Translation: French Prints and American Visual Culture 1848–1876" explores the various appropriations of French reproductive prints in nineteenth-century America. Her dissertation has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Caroline and Erwin Swann Foundation, and the American Antiquarian Society. Her interests include the role of images in transnational exchanges, intermedia translation, and the nineteenth-century emergence of a global art market.

Alessandra Di Croce

Italian Renaissance Art

Alessandra Di Croce, a fourth-year student, specializes in Italian Renaissance Art; her research interests are focused on the relationship between visual arts and religious issues in late 16th/early 17th century Italy, within a context of important cultural transformations at the dawn of modern thought.

Her dissertation analyzes the impact that collections of Early Christian and Medieval art objects in post-Tridentine Rome had on the development of a new understanding and appreciation of earlier art, as well as on the paleo-Christian revival of the late 16th/early 17th century in Rome. Alessandra received her BA and MA (Scuola di Specializzazione) from the University of Rome "La Sapienza". From 2001 to 2005 she collaborated with the "Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Romano", participating in several cataloguing projects and in the organization of the exhibition Il Settecento a Roma (Rome, Palazzo di Venezia, November 2005–February 2006). Alessandra has also published with Italian journals (Bollettino d'Arte, Ricerche di Storia dell'Arte, Neoclassico), and written catalogue entries for several exhibition catalogues (Il Gran Teatro del Mondo. L'Anima e il Volto del Settecento, Milan 2003; Il Settecento a Roma, Rome 2005–2006; GOYA e la tradizione italiana, Parma 2006; San Nicola da Tolentino nell'arte. Corpus iconografico, Tolentino 2006, vol. II).

Adam Eaker

Early Modern European art; the history of art history

Adam Eaker received his B.A. in art history from Yale in 2007. Before coming to Columbia, he worked at the Yale Center for British Art and for a dealer in Old Master drawings.

Frank Feltens

Japanese Art

Frank Feltens studies Japanese art history under Professor Matthew P. McKelway. He received his B.A. in Japanese Studies from Humboldt University in Berlin and spent a year at Kyoto University as an undergraduate. His main research focuses are Momoyama and Edo period painting (particularly Rinpa) and its links with theater and classical literature. In this context he tries to draw connections between practices in the consumption and understanding of classical literature (e.g. through Noh theater, digests or renga manuals) and art in these periods. His other interests include medieval depictions of classical themes, premodern art criticism and intersections between different artistic media.

Andrew Finegold

Ancient American Art and Architecture; African Art; Visual Narrativity; Popular Characterizations of Cultural Difference

Andrew earned a B.A. from the University of Houston, receiving numerous awards related to his Honor's Thesis, "Cacaxtla: Iconographic Interactions with El Tajin, Veracruz". He joined the Department of Art History and Archaeology in 2005 to study Pre-Columbian art with Esther Pasztory. Currently, he is working on a dissertation titled "Battle Murals and the Struggle for Elite Legitimacy in Epiclassic Mesoamerica", which investigates images of conflict at the sites of Cacaxtla, Bonampak, and Chichen Itza. His analysis treats these unprecedentedly complex and dramatic scenes in terms of their narrativity and rhetorical function during a period of political upheaval and changing power structures. Through his research, he has developed a strong interest in the structure and interpretation of visual narratives.

Michael Anthony Fowler

Greek and Roman art and archaeology; sacred space and ritual practice; images of violence; text-image relations; archaeology and history of the Mediterranean islands

Michael is a second-year doctoral student with a concentration on ancient art. He came to Columbia from Tufts University, where he completed an M.A. in Classical Archaeology with a thesis entitled "'Consider, if we were islanders...' (Thuc. 1.143.5): Thalassocracy, the Long Walls, and the insularization of Athens". During his time at Tufts he participated in two seasons of field work in Western Sicily with the Marsala Hinterland Survey. During his first year at Columbia, Michael joined the Chronique archéologique de la religion grecque (ChronARG) as a contributor as well as interned in the Collection of Vases and Minor Arts at the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. In addition, he serves as Research Assistant to Profs. Ioannis Mylonopoulos (Columbia), Angelos Chaniotis (Institute for Advanced Study), and Joan Branham (Providence College). In addition to Michael's M.A., he holds an M.T.S. in Religions of the World from Harvard University and a B.A. in Sociology and Philosophy from The Colorado College.

Emily Friedman

Italian Renaissance and Baroque; Northern Baroque; Architectural History, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Arts and Crafts Movement, History of Photography

Emily Friedman is primarily interested in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque. She earned her B.A. (2009) from Bates College, where she wrote a thesis on Bernini's Roman fountains and their relationship to the city fabric and papal power. She spent the 2007–2008 academic year studying in the History of Art Department at University College London.

Emily has held internships at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Bates College Museum of Art, and, most recently, The Barnes Foundation. As a curatorial intern, her work at The Barnes included exhibition and provenance research.

Amanda Gannaway

Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture, visual strategies of empire, archaeology as cultural patrimony

Amanda Gannaway received a B.A. in Archaeology from Barnard College in 2006 and an M.A. in Art History from Columbia University in 2009, where she currently studies the art and architecture of the pre-Columbian Americas. Amanda has participated in archaeological projects in Belize, Ecuador, Bolivia and Scotland and has worked in museums in New York and Peru. Her current research focuses on the material culture of groups inhabiting the Peruvian north coast during the Late Intermediate Period.

Sofia Gans

Early Christian and Medieval Art and Architecture; Applications of Digital Technology in Teaching of Art History

Sofia Gans graduated from Vassar College in 2009 with a degree in art history and French. Her area of focus is early Christian and medieval art and architecture, specifically the relationships between objects and the built environment and the arts of pilgrimage. Additionally, Sofia spent two summers traveling to France with Columbia's Media Center for Art History, working on the Mellon-funded Mapping Gothic France research database. This project, along with a year and a half spent working in the Education department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also gave Sofia a strong interest in teaching art history in both a classroom and museum setting, specifically applications of new technology to further access and engagement with objects and sites.

William T. Gassaway

Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture

In 2006, William earned a bachelor's degree in art history from the University of New Mexico, where he worked under Jennifer von Schwerin. Now in his fourth year as a student of Esther Pasztory's, William is largely engaged with representations of the body in Aztec sculpture and the codices, antiquarianism, embodied knowledge, and phenomenology and art.

Alexandra Helprin

Russia between Peter I and 1917, Reception of Classical Antiquity, Neoclassicism and its Detractors

Alexandra received her A.B. in classical archaeology from Harvard in 2007. After graduation, she served as a lecturer at Moscow City Pedagogical University and worked for two summers at Sardis in Manisa Province, Turkey. Her interests include Russia's changing relationship with classical antiquity, Russian art criticism in the nineteenth century, and the history of collecting.

Anna Hetherington

Northern and Italian Renaissance Art

Anna is currently writing her dissertation, Melancholy Illusions: From Bosch to Titian, in which she aims to examine the pictorial and theoretical dimensions of the concept of melancholy as they were understood, expressed, and, most importantly, figured by Renaissance artists. She received her B.A. in Art History and Psychology from UC Berkeley in 2003 and her M.A. and M.Phil. degrees from Columbia University in 2006 and 2008, respectively.

Subhashini Kaligotla

Subhashini Kaligotla is a doctoral candidate in South Asian art with a research focus on the sixth to eighth century temple architecture of India's Deccan region. Other research interests include Indo-Islamic architecture, the contemporary art of South Asia, Orientalism, and postcolonial theory. She has taught the history of Indian art and architecture at Barnard College, Columbia University, and New York University. Subhashini also holds advanced degrees in electrical engineering and creative writing (poetry), and is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship for literary translation. Her poetry has been published in literary journals and anthologies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India.

Katherine Kasdorf

South Asian Art and Architecture, Reuse and Diachronic Change, Historiography, Historical Urbanization

Katherine earned her B.A. in Art History from New York University (2003), where she concentrated on architecture in South Asia and the Islamic world. Before entering Columbia in 2004, she held an internship in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At Columbia, Katherine studies the art historical traditions of South Asia, focusing on the architectural history of southern India and the Deccan. Her dissertation, "Forming Dorasamudra: Temples of the Hoysala Capital in Context", investigates the roles of individual temples within the social, physical, and visual landscapes of a site that flourished during the 12th–13th centuries. Katherine's publications include "Translating Sacred Space in Bijapur: The Mosques of Karim al-Din and Khwaja Jahan" (Archives of Asian Art, 2009) and visitors' guides to the temple sites of Halebid and Somanathapura, produced by Jackfruit Research and Design for the Archaeological Survey of India (2009–10).

SeungJung Kim

Classical Art and Archaeology; Archaic and Classical Greek Art; Archaeology of Sicily; Ancient Philosophies of Art; Cross-Cultural Currents in Art; Gandharan Buddhist Art

Trained originally as an Astrophysicist, SeungJung came under the spell of Classical Archaeology at University of Virginia, where she eventually obtained her MA in Art History. With a penchant for Sicilian archaeology, she also spent one year working at the Metropolitan Museum, before coming to Columbia University for her doctorate. She is currently working on her dissertation titled, "Concepts of Time and Temporality in the Visual Tradition of Late Archaic and Classical Greece," where she tries to explore how changing notions of time in the visual arts can be contextualized to the larger cultural history of Time. She also keeps a keen interest in her minor field of Gandharan Buddhist Art, as an expression of one of the most powerful cross-cultural currents that bridges the Classical West and the Asian world.

Page Knox

Late-nineteenth century American art

Her dissertation, "Scribner's Monthly 1871–1882: Transforming the Perception, Reception and Consumption of Art in Post-Civil War America" explores the impact of print media on art in the Gilded Age. She holds a B.A. in art history and economics/political science from Yale University.

Clare Kobasa

Italian Renaissance and Baroque; British Art; Printmaking/Print Culture

Clare graduated with a BA in 2010 from Swarthmore College with a double major in history and art history. She has interned in the print departments at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As a fellow at the Slought Foundation in 2010-2011 she was the research assistant for "Architecture on Display." Other research interests include the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican, the relationship between English and Chinese gardening and landscaping practices in the eighteenth century, Roman mosaics in Sicily, and southern Italian Renaissance art.

Sandrine Larrivé-Bass

East Asian Art History and Archaeology; Early China; Cross-Materiality; Materiality

Risha Lee

South Asian Art and Architecture; Chinese Art and Architecture

Risha Lee studies South Asian art and architecture, focusing on South India, with a minor in Chinese art. Her dissertation, "Constructing Community": Tamil Merchants in India and China, 850-1281, studies the exchange of art, people, and ideas between India and China. Her research interests also include Indian Ocean trade and Tamil epigraphy.

Emily Liebert

Modern and Contemporary Art, Feminist Theory, Performance

Emily is currently a Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellow at the Archives of American Art in Washington D.C. She is at work on her dissertation, "Roles Recast: Eleanor Antin and the 1970s," which will provide the first book-length study devoted to the pivotal artist Eleanor Antin (b. 1935, New York). In particular, the project explores the ways that embodiment and humor serve Antin's feminist artistic practice as she develops it across genres and mediums. Beyond the parameters of a single artist's work, the dissertation shows that Antin's hybrid model of post-Conceptualist feminist performance challenges dominant narratives of late twentieth-century American art history in core ways.

Emily was a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. She has taught in Columbia's Department of Art History and its School of Visual Arts. Emily holds a B.A. in art history from Yale. Between college and graduate school she worked at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

Natasha Marie Llorens

Modern and Contemporary Art

Natasha Marie Llorens is a PhD candidate in modern and contemporary art and an independent curator. Recent projects include participation in Design Act, a Stockholm-based platform for on socially and politically engaged design and architecture, and Double Session, an exhibition on social practice and deconstruction at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) at Bard College. She holds a BA in Art History from Simon’s Rock College, and an MA in Contemporary Curating from the CCS.

M. Jordan Love

Gothic Architecture and Medieval Urbanism; Romanesque Architecture and Sculpture; Italian Renaissance Art and Architecture; Oceanic and Precolumian Art; Museum and Curatorial Studies

M. Jordan Love is a PhD student in Art History at Columbia University, studying medieval architecture with Stephen Murray. Her dissertation is focused on the architecture and city planning of the bastide towns of southwestern France. She earned her master's degree from Columbia in 2007 and her B.A. from Wellesley College. Her master's research involved the Priory of St-Jean de Bas Nueil—the priory Chapter House is now located in the Worcester Art Museum. Jordan worked for seven years in the Curatorial Department of the Worcester Art Museum, winning the Kinnicutt Travel Grant that began her on-site research and photographic documentation of Le Bas Nueil. She also curated the exhibition "The Harlem Renaissance and Its Legacy" in 2003 and taught adult education courses on architectural history in the education department. She also worked in the Curatorial Department of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, where she was involved with exhibition research and digital imaging of the collection.

Risham Majeed

Romanesque Sculpture and Historiography; African sculpture; history and theory of collecting and display; studio photography

I was educated at the University of Chicago (B.A., 2002) and at the Courtauld Institute of Art (M.A. Gothic Architecture, 2004). Having specialized in Romanesque sculpture, my dissertation seeks to expand the reception of Romanesque art in France to include its parallel treatment with non-Western art, especially African sculpture, during the early colonial period.

I have received grants from the Georges Lurcy Foundation and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for archival work conducted in Paris, Strasbourg, and Autun.

Jessica Maratsos

Italian Renaissance Art

Jessica is a PhD candidate in her fifth year at Columbia. Her dissertation focuses on the intersection between religious reform and pictorial innovation in Florence during the first half of the sixteenth century. She received her BA from Amherst College in 2004 and an MPhil from Cambridge University in 2006.

Francesca Marzullo

Italian Renaissance Art

Francesca Marzullo studies the art and architecture of the Italian Renaissance with a secondary interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American painting. She holds a B.A. from Williams College, an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, and an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Nomaduma Rose Masilela

Modern and Contemporary African Art; Art Theory; Postcolonial Theory; Comparative Art Histories

Nomaduma Masilela is a second-year PhD candidate who studies modern and contemporary art from Africa and the Diaspora. She is a Ford Pre-Doctoral Fellow and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow.

Nomaduma received her BA from Barnard College (2007). She was a Curatorial Fellow at The Kitchen, New York (2007-08) and conducted independent research in Dakar, Senegal as a Mortimer Hays Brandeis Traveling Fellow (2008-09) before arriving at Columbia University.

Megan McCarthy

Modern German and American Art; Museum Studies; Art and National Identity; Theory of Ornamentation and Decoration

Megan specializes in German-American artistic exchange during the long 19th century. Her dissertation, The Empire on Display: Exhibitions of German Art and Design in America, 1897-1914, will serve as the first comprehensive, critical study of the reception of Germanic art in the U.S. during the late Wilhelmine period. Megan received her M.A. with distinction from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006 and her B.A. from Columbia, where she graduated with honors in 2004. Previously a member of the Development Department at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Megan has held internships at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art, where she also served as a foreign language lecturer. As a recipient of a Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Council for European Studies, Megan will present her work at the Nineteenth International Conference of Europeanists in March 2012. Currently, Megan is a Visiting Fellow at the Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dartmouth College.

Jeffrey A. K. Miller

Architecture and Art of the Medieval West; Arts of West Africa

Jeff is writing a dissertation on Gothic churches in northern England titled "The Building Program of Walter de Gray: Architectural Production and Reform in the Archdiocese of York, 1215–1255." His work focuses on the anthropological role of architectural patronage within broader campaigns of institutional management. The project has been awarded a grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Jeff has an additional interest in introducing the public to art history and worked throughout his time in New York as a lecturer at The Cloisters. He will also be a contributing author in the forthcoming Cambridge History of Religious Architecture of the World. He holds a BA from the University of Iowa (2003) and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art (2004). Currently, he lives in Singapore.

Maggie Mustard

East Asian Art; Modern and Contemporary Japanese Visual Culture; Critical Theory; Representations of World War II and the Atomic Bomb; Memory and Trauma

Maggie received her B.A. in Art History and East Asian Studies from Brown University in 2007, where her thesis on Japanese atomic bomb survivor paintings received the George Downing Prize in Art History. In 2010, she graduated from the New School for Social Research with a master's degree in Liberal Studies and critical theory; her master's thesis investigated the visual representations of the atomic bomb in Japanese newspaper publications under the American postwar occupation of Japan. At Columbia, she hopes to continue her research around the intersection of visual culture and memory in Japan, particularly focused on the postwar period and representations of the atomic bomb over time.

Yemi Onafuwa

Yemi Onafuwa studied Art History at Kalamazoo College and at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London). He received an MPhil from Columbia, and is currently writing a dissertation entitled "Bruegel's Vernacular Bodies." Yemi has published papers on 16th-century visual culture and on contemporary African art, and has given numerous talks. He is also the author of a novella and a novel, the latter to published by Random House in February 2011.

Stephanie O'Rourke

European Art in the Long Nineteenth Century; History of the Body and Conditions of Spectatorship; History of the Projected Image

Stephanie O'Rourke studies European visual culture from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. She is particularly interested in the historical conditions of embodied spectatorship and the popular and discursive formulation of the nervous body. Research topics include the sublime, Romanticism, scientific discourse about perception and the body, the nineteenth-century novel, and early film and photography. Stephanie received a B.A. from Harvard University in Art History and English Literature.

Giulia Paoletti

African Art, History of Photography, Modern and Contemporary Art

Giulia Paoletti studied Art History at Sussex University (B.A. 2004) and the School of Oriental and African Studies (M.A. 2006) with a specialization in African art. She is currently writing her dissertation on the history of photography in Senegal. She has conducted research in Senegal, Nigeria, Mali and Cameroon, where she has examined contemporary photographic practices, and collaborated with institutions such as doual'art, iStrike Foundation and lettera27 Foundation. She was recently appointed a Columbia University Mellon Traveling Fellow (2011-12) and Reid Hall Fellow (2011) to conduct research in Senegal and Europe.

Matt Peebles

Ancient Greek Art and Archaeology

Matt is a first year PhD candidate in ancient art history and archaeology. He received his bachelor's degree from Cornell University and went on to earn master's degrees in education and art history. While working as a teacher for a New York City public school, he received grants to conduct art historical research in Greece, Egypt, and Israel. Matt plans to specialize in ancient Greek art, and has particular interest in religious sculpture during the Archaic Period and intercultural connections in artistic practices throughout antiquity.

Elizabeth Perkins

Italian Renaissance painting & sculpture; Early Netherlandish painting

My interest in Italian art developed during my time at Middlebury, when I studied in Florence and became fluent in Italian. Upon finishing my B.A. I lived in Italy for several years, where I continued to study art and conservation. I worked as an intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and as a teaching assistant for an art history professor in Florence before beginning my Ph.D. at Columbia. My major field is Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture, and I have a minor specialization in early Netherlandish painting. I am currently writing my dissertation, which analyzes the emergence of the independent portrait in Quattrocento Venice.

For more information, visit www.columbia.edu/~eap2109.

Turkan Pilavci

Art and archaeology of the ancient Near East

Turkan is a PhD student, specializing in the art and archaeology of the ancient Near East. She received her B.A. in Political Science and History from Bogazici University, Istanbul in 2006. She completed her M.A. in the Archeology of the Eastern Mediterranean in K.U. Leuven in 2007. Having participated in numerous field projects, since 2007 she has been a part of the Tarsus Gozlukule Archaeology Project, Turkey.

Leah Pires

Modern & Contemporary Art

Leah Pires is a first-year PhD student focusing on modern and contemporary art. She is particularly interested in conceptual art, institutional critique, and the intersections of art and activism. Her work is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach that explores cross-pollination between diverse mediums and sociohistorical forces. Leah's undergraduate thesis drew on the institutional critiques of Fred Wilson and Andrea Fraser to develop a theoretical framework for pluralistic curatorial strategies. She graduated with highest distinction from McGill University in 2011 after completing an undergraduate degree in Art History and English.

Neeraja Poddar

South Asian Art History, Indian Painting

PhD, Sixth Year

Eszter Polonyi

Central-Eastern European art, film and cultural theory from 1890s to 1930s, historiography, theories of the avant- and rear-garde, ideas of formalism, radical politics and an aesthetic of resistance

Eszter received her MA from the Courtauld in German Romantic Art and her BA from Wellesley College in Art History and English Literature. Her prior work focused on artist colonies, Historicism, Nationalism and Romanticism. She has published on Historicism and the Nazarenes in Inferno Journal of Art History, has given papers on Hungarian artist collectives and Marina Abramovic and was the recipient of grants and fellowships from DAAD, Harriet Shaw, AHRC, Hungarian Ministry of Education and the Stecher. She exhibited an installation piece on the legacy of Eastern-European immigrant art historians at the Kraft Center.

Olivia Powell

Italian Renaissance Art; The History of Dance; Interdisciplinary Approaches to Art History; African Art and Architecture

Olivia Powell, a 7th year student, studies the Italian Renaissance with Professors David Rosand and David Freedberg. Her dissertation, "The Choreographic Imagination in Renaissance Art," explores the notion of an autonomous history of dance within art. At Columbia, she has taught Masterpieces of Western Art, as well as Dance and the Early Modern Artist—an undergraduate course of her own design. She has also held an adjunct position at Parsons the New School for Design, and an internship at the Morgan Library. Olivia also maintains an active interest in African art and architecture. Her M.Phil degree was awarded with a minor in this field, and in 2007 she co-curated Primitivism Revisited: After the End of an Idea at Sean Kelly Gallery. Olivia is the recipient of fellowships from the Jacob K. Javits Foundation and Columbia University.

Aaron M. Rio

Muromachi Period (1336–1573) Painting; Zen Buddhist Art; Medieval Japanese Sinology; Ink Painting in the Kanto Region

Aaron is a doctoral candidate in premodern Japanese art and is currently preparing a dissertation that examines medieval Japanese images of renowned poets from Chinese antiquity, from their introduction and development within the Zen monastic context to their eventual canonization by professional painters in the late medieval period. He is particularly interested in painting as representation of and medium for sacred encounters, both real and imagined. Aaron graduated with highest distinction from Indiana University where he received a B.A., with honors, in English and East Asian Languages and Cultures (2004). Before entering the Ph.D. program at Columbia in 2006, he worked for two years in Nara Prefecture, Japan. He received his M.A. (2008) and M.Phil. (2010) in art history from Columbia. He is currently supported by the Japan Foundation and is based at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo.

Tina Rivers

Modernism; postwar American art and film; visual culture; media

Tina is a fifth-year graduate student whose dissertation examines the relationship between technology, psychedelia, and art in the 1960s, reflecting her general interest in the rhetorical invocation of altered states of perception in the 19th and 20th centuries. She received her B.A. in art history from Harvard and also received an M.A. in visual studies from the University of California, Irvine before coming to Columbia. She has presented conference papers on topics including the historical use of psychedelics to design therapeutic architectural spaces for schizophrenics, Timothy Leary's video game Mind Mirror, and Peter Watkins's film La Commune. Her essay on Peter Whitehead's film The Fall is forthcoming in Framework.

Drew Sawyer

History of Photography; Art and Architecture of the United States; Early American Modernisms; the Art Market; History of Collecting and Display; Material Culture Theory; Queer Studies

Drew is interested in the institutional and professional practices of photography, particularly as they intersect and complicate artistic ones. He is currently working on his dissertation, Walker Evans for Hire: Photography, Work, and Style. In 2011, he co-curated the exhibition 'Social Forces Visualized': Photography and Scientific Charity, 1900-1920, an in-depth examination of the pedagogical and publicity practices of Progressive Era charity and social work organizations. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue reconsidered photographs by Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, and Jessie Tarbox Beals, among others. He has served as a curatorial research assistant at the The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and received his B.A. in Economics and Art History from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Sarah C. Schaefer

19th-Century Visual Culture; History of Photography; Technologies of Reproduction; Religion and Media; Art and Politics

Sarah Schaefer is a PhD candidate focusing on nineteenth-century visual culture. She is currently working on her dissertation, "Reading from the Book of Gustave Doré: Religion, Media, Modernity." This project investigates how Doré's biblical art created new, transnational viewing practices situated between the secular and the sacred. She completed her BA in the History of Art at the University of Michigan in 2005, receiving Highest Honors for her undergraduate thesis on French political caricature in the aftermath of the Paris Commune. In 2009, she received an MA from Columbia University, with a thesis on the subject of the exhibition of Art Nouveau interiors. She has presented work in the United States, Canada, and Germany.

Joseph Scheier-Dolberg

Chinese painting and calligraphy; Chinese decorative objects; modern and contemporary ink painting in China

Joseph Scheier-Dolberg studies the history of Chinese art, with a focus on painting. He received his BA from Swarthmore College in 2000 and his MA from Harvard University in 2005. In between, he spent time in Sichuan Province studying the history of Tibetan mural painting in a monastery on the border of the Tibet Autonomous Region. Prior to coming to Columbia in 2009, he spent several years working in the Chinese art department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Anna Seastrand

Anna Seastrand is a sixth-year PhD candidate who specializes in South Asian art. Her dissertation, Praise, Politics and Language: South Indian Mural Paintings 1500-1800, links artists' and patrons' choices of visual style and inscriptional language to broader social, political, and linguistic contexts. Anna is residing in India for the 2010-2011 academic year to further her research on this subject. For her dissertation research, Anna has been awarded an Ittleson Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and the Dakshina Chitra Graduate Student Fellowship. She received her B.A. with high honors in art history from Wesleyan University (2003), where she wrote a thesis on Mughal painting.

Yuthika Sharma

South Asian and Indo-Islamic art; Early Buddhist art and architecture, art and architectural representation from the Early modern period to the present; the long eighteenth century; Colonialism and cross-cultural exchange, garden and landscape theory, philosophies of representation, artistic practice

Yuthika is a final-year candidate in South Asian art and architecture. Her earlier post-graduate work has been at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, on Victorian landscapes in Delhi, and graduate work at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her dissertation titled, "Art and Praxis in the midst of Empires: Later-Mughal or Company(?) Painting at Delhi 1750-1858" studies the artistic culture of north India in the final century of Mughal rule as the subcontinent came under the sphere of British governance.

Yuthika Sharma and William Dalrymple are curators of the upcoming exhibition, "Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707-1857" at the Asia Society, New York February-May, 2012, and editors of the namesake book-catalogue (Asia Society, Yale University Press, 2012). Yuthika's essay in the book highlights the lesser-known aspects of the Delhi painter Ghulam Ali Khan's career. Her recent publications include, "A House of Wonder: Silver at the Delhi Durbar Exhibition of 1903" in Vidya Dehejia. Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj (Mapin, 2008). Her forthcoming publications include, "From miniatures to monuments: Picturing Shah Alam’s Delhi 1771-1806" in Karen Leonard and Alka Patel, Eds. Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition (Brill, 2011), and an essay (with Chanchal Dadlani) on late Mughal visual culture for the Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, Vol. II, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, edited by Gulru Necipoglu and Finbarr Barry Flood.

Julia Siemon

Art of the Italian Renaissance, particularly sixteenth century Florentine painting; Early Netherlandish painting; Venetian art

I am a 5th year Ph.D. candidate. I received a BA in Art History and Spanish from Washington University in Saint Louis in 2006. My advisor is Professor David Rosand. My dissertation is tentatively entitled "Bronzino between the Republic and the Academy" and deals with certain portraits produced before the artist became court painter to Duke Cosimo I.

Rachel Silveri

Modern and Contemporary Art

Rachel Silveri studies modern and contemporary art and has a broad interest in the thematic of the everyday across the historic and neo-avant-gardes. She received her B.A. in History of Art and Gender Studies from the University of Michigan in 2008 and was awarded an M.A. from Columbia in 2010.

Therese Sjøvoll

The history of collecting and museums; seventeenth-century art and theory; and Odd Nerdrum, kitsch, and the figurative tradition

Therese Sjøvoll's dissertation is entitled "Queen Christina of Sweden's Musaeum: Collecting and Display in the Palazzo Riario" (dissertation sponsor, Prof. D. Freedberg). Her current research interests include the history of collecting and museums; seventeenth-century art and theory; and Odd Nerdrum, kitsch, and the figurative tradition. In Oslo, Therese assisted with the Odd Nerdrum retrospective exhibition at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art. She also lectured at The Munch Museum and the Royal Palace of Norway. In London she interned at Sotheby's, and in New York she lectured at Scandinavia House and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She currently teaches art history at the University of Oslo. Therese has received awards from the Berit Wallenberg Foundation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Attingham Trust, The American Scandinavian Foundation, the Norway-America Association, and The Fulbright Commission. In her spare time, Therese is in the garden or at sea.

Zachary D. Stewart

Medieval (and Neomedieval) Art and Architecture

Zachary Stewart holds a B.Arch in Architecture and Medieval Studies from the University of Notre Dame (2007) and an M.A. in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art (2008). While attending the latter institution on a Fulbright grant, he completed a prize-winning thesis on the thirteenth-century choir of the Temple Church in London, a building that sparked his continuing fascination with medieval architecture in England. His dissertation will examine the multiple temporalities of late medieval parish churches in East Anglia. Zachary has worked as a student research associate in the Research Forum at the Courtauld and as a field photographer and digital cataloger for the "Mapping Gothic France" project. He currently lectures at The Cloisters Museum in New York.

Chun-Yi (Joyce) Tsai

Arts of East Asia (especially paintings from Song-Yuan China and Muromachi-Edo Japan)

Chun-Yi 'Joyce' Tsai joined Columbia University in 2006. Before then, she completed her B.A. in English Literature at National Taiwan University and earned an M.A. in East Asian Studies at Harvard University. Her dissertation concerns the origins, transmission, and perception of images of the supernatural grotesque in Song-Yuan China. This project emerged from her interest in Chinese popular culture nurtured in her Harvard years, where she worked on topics related to the lay religion, vernacular literature, and folk arts of Late Imperial China. In between her degrees, she worked in broadcast journalism and in the education and curatorial divisions of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Freer & Sackler Galleries, and The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.

Alexandra Tunstall

Chinese Art

Alexandra Tunstall studies Chinese art, focusing on painting and textile arts, at Columbia University. Prior to her time at Columbia, Alexandra received her BA in art history from Oberlin College in 1996. She worked as an intern at the Freer/Sackler galleries, Smithsonian Institution, with the curator of late imperial Chinese arts. She completed her MA in Asian art history at the University of Kansas in 1999, and then lived in Nanjing for a year, studying language, history, and calligraphy at the University of Nanjing. Currently she is living in Decatur, Georgia, with her husband and two young sons, continuing work on her dissertation entitled, "Woven Paintings: Chinese Tapestries in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) Dynasties." She is interested in exploring issues of women's production of art, craft vs. high art, and the collection practices that have manipulated and framed such works of art.

Andrea Fabiola Vazquez

Pre-Columbian Art, Architecture, and Archaeology

Andrea holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2001) and an MA in Art History from Columbia University (2009). Her interest in ancient American art history grew out of an extended period of travel throughout Central and South America. Drawing on her previous studies of visual communications, Andrea's research explores the relationship between semiotics and materiality in Andean visual culture.

Julia Vazquez

Northern Renaissance and Baroque, Iberian Renaissance and Baroque, Perception/Response Theory

Julia studies Renaissance and Baroque art under Professor David Freedberg. She received her B.A. in 2009 from Brown University, where she double-concentrated in the history of art and architecture and classics. She went on to internships in the Department of Paintings at the Musée du Louvre and in the Client Services/Business Development department of Sotheby's, Paris, before continuing her graduate studies at Columbia in the fall of 2010. Her interests include: the problems associated with portraiture; issues in perception and cognition; the organization of daily experience by means of urban planning and design; the mediating role of objects in encounters with the sacred; and the various means by which artworks direct our encounter with them and assert a certain agency within the context of the viewing experience.

Lorenzo Vigotti

Italian Renaissance Architecture

Lorenzo received his M. Arch. summa cum laude from the University of Florence in Italy in 2008 with a thesis on Florentine architecture in the late-fourteenth century entitled "The Palace of Francesco di Marco Datini in Prato." As a trained architect he worked in Florence for a firm specializing in architectural restoration and continued his research on early Renaissance architecture both in Florence and Oxford. Lorenzo joined the doctoral program at Columbia University in 2009; his research interests include the structural behavior and preservation of medieval and Renaissance buildings as well as cultural exchange between Europe and the Islamic world during the Renaissance.

Brigid von Preussen

Nineteenth century European art; historiography; art criticism; history of collecting; revival styles

Brigid received her BA in Art History at Cambridge University in 2006, and her MA in Intellectual and Cultural History, 1300–1650, at the Warburg Institute in 2008. Her interests include the reception of Renaissance art and culture in nineteenth-century Europe.

Susan Wager

Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Visual Culture; Eighteenth-Century Consumption and Collecting; Early Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Practices and Media Theory

Susan Wager specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French visual culture. Her dissertation focuses on eighteenth-century reproductions after François Boucher in the mediums of engraved gems, porcelain, and tapestry. She earned a B.A. in French & Romance Philology and Art History at Columbia in 2004 and spent three years as an assistant in the Art of Europe department of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her M.A. qualifying paper at Columbia was entitled "'Les Dadas Visitent Paris': Toward a New Definition of the Dada Diagram." Susan has received fellowships from the Council for European Studies and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and has presented papers at Boston University, UCLA, the Yale Center for British Art, and at the CAA Annual Conference.

Robert Wiesenberger

Modern and contemporary architecture and design

Robert is a second year in the Department. His focus is on 20th century architecture and industrial and graphic design, especially in pre-war Germany. His masters thesis (2010) examined the exhibition design of Herbert Bayer and László Moholy-Nagy. He has delivered papers at Cambridge University, UCLA and the Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, and is the organizer of the Collins/Kaufmann Forum for Modern Architectural History at Columbia. Robert holds a B.A. in History from the University of Chicago. He has worked at the design firms MetaDesign and Ammunition in San Francisco, and as an intern in the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA. He is the recipient of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education.

Serdar Yalcin

Art and archaeology of ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze and Iron Ages; Roman art and architecture

Serdar Yalcin is a PhD student of ancient art with particular interest in the art of ancient Near East in the Bronze Age. He received his BA in psychology, and MA in archaeology at Bogaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. His research interests include artistic interconnections in ancient eastern Mediterranean, Anatolian art and archaeology, Roman provincial art. Currently Serdar is working on his dissertation titled "Seals and patronage in the Late Bronze Age, ca. 1550–1150 BC". In this study, he investigates the issue of art patronage among non-royal groups in the Late Bronze Age Near Eastern societies through an analysis of the glyptic material.

Kori Lisa Yee Litt

Early Renaissance Italian Painting; Chinese Art

Kori Lisa Yee Litt specializes in Italian art, with an emphasis on Sienese and Florentine painting of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Her research interests include frescoes and illuminated manuscripts produced for and by the major mendicant orders, the global dissemination of early Renaissance art, and theories of sensory perception. In the field of Chinese art, Kori has focused on the topic of materiality in Song Dynasty painting, the history of Chinese calligraphy, and contemporary artist Xu Bing. This year she is teaching both Art Humanities and Asian Art Humanities. Kori received an M.A. in Art History from Williams College in 2007 and a B.A. in Art History and Psychological & Brain Sciences from Dartmouth College in 2005.

Gillian Young

Modern and Contemporary Art; Performance Studies; Media History and Theory

Gillian Young studies modern and contemporary art and is interested in questions of performance and representation across cultural and curatorial contexts. Before coming to Columbia, she worked in the Department of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art. She holds a B.A. in Literature from Brown University and a M.A. in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU.

Taryn Marie Zarrillo

17th century Venetian art with a particular interest in issues of patrimony, the history of collecting, and forgeries

Her dissertation, Artistic Patrimony and Cultural Politics in Seicento Venice, expands on initial studies begun at the Courtauld Institute of Art where she studied with Professor Sheila McTighe and received an MA in 2002. Prior to entering the Ph.D program at Columbia University she worked in the curatorial departments of several institutions, including: the Mount Holyoke Museum of Art, The MIT Museum, the Courtauld Gallery (where she also served on the Advisory Committee), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Musée du Louvre. She has also served as an international art courier, exhibition organizer, is trained in conservation techniques and during summers has taught for Art History Abroad, a British based program. Taryn Marie received her BA in Renaissance and Baroque Studies from Mount Holyoke College and currently works with Professors David Rosand and Simon Schama at Columbia. When she is not studying art, she is an avid fencer, training in New York and Venice.