Graduate Alumni
Lorraine J. Affourtit
Assistant Professor, Art History, Appalachian State University
Dissertation completed in 2020: “Visualizing Decolonial Democracy in the Oaxaca Commune”
Christina Ayson Plank
Asian Pacific American Collections Specialist at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Dissertation completed in 2024: “Counter-Productivity as Resistance: Contemporary Art of the Filipino Labor Diaspora”
Sara Blaylock
Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Art and Design, University of Minnesota – Duluth
Dissertation completed in 2017: “Infiltration and Excess: Experimental Art and the East German State, 1980 – 1989”
Brinker Ferguson
Manager of the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement (DHSE) cluster and director of the Digital Cultural Heritage Lab at Dartmouth College
Dissertation completed in 2018: “Recalibrating the Museum: The Politics of Stewardship and the Physical/Digital Repatriation of Te Hau-Ki-Turanga”
Tara Field
Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow of Art History, Utah Tech University
Dissertation completed in 2024: “The Longevity of the Maiolica Ex-Voto Tradition at the Madonna Dei Bagni: Materializing Sacred Time and Space”
Gaby Greenlee
Lecturer, UC Santa Cruz
Dissertation completed in 2022: “Inka Borders and the Power of Volatility: on the Fringes and Edges of Textiles and Territory”
Christina Hellmich
Curator in Charge, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas and the Jolika Collection of New Guinea Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco de Young \ Legion of Honor
Dissertation completed in 2023: ““See The Natives”: Indigenous Visual Culture at the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition”
Amber Hickey
Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
Dissertation completed in 2018: “The Aesthetics of Decolonial Worlding: Contemporary Art and Activism Across Turtle Island”
Aubrey Hobart
Professor of Indigenous North and South American Art, Savannah College of Art and Design
Dissertation completed in 2018: “Treasures and Splendors: Exhibiting Colonial Latin American Art in U.S. Museums, 1920-2020”
Kate Korroch
Co-Editor, Visual Studies Journal
Dissertation completed in 2023: “The Intimacies of Queer Subjects: TT Takemoto’s “Looking for Jiro” (2011), “Semiotics of Sab (2016), and “Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung)” (2021)”
Kristen Laciste
Assistant Professor, Historian of African Art and Visual Culture at the State University of New York, Fashion Institute of Technology
Dissertation completed in 2022: “Delightful or Decadent?: Perceptions of Sapeuses and Sapeurs in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo”
Ace Lehner
Assistant Professor in Art and Art History, University of Vermont
Dissertation completed in 2020: “Trans Representations: Non-Binary Visual Theory in Contemporary Photography”
Website: http://ace-lehner.com/
Katie Ligmond
Lecturer, Santa Clara University
Dissertation completed in 2024: “Deliberate Confusion: The Role of Abstraction in Imperial Andean Textile Design”
Leslie Lodwick
Lecturer, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Dissertation completed in 2024: “Architectures of Schooling: School Construction Systems Development, 1961-1969”
Alexandra Macheski
Academic Technology Analyst, Stanford University
Dissertation completed in 2023: ““Anti-Bodies”: Inkas and Amazonians Thinking Otherwise”
Amanda M. Maples
Françoise Billion Richardson Curator of African Art, New Orleans Museum of Art
Dissertation completed in 2018: “Free Youth in Freetown: Masked Performance and Urban Cultural Arts in Sierra Leone”
Maureen McGuire
Assistant Professor, Jacksonville State University
Dissertation completed in 2024: “Unacknowledged Influence: The Impact of Anikia Juliana’s Cultural Matronage on 6th-Century Constantinople”
Alexandra Moore
Curator of academic programs and project manager, Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz
Dissertation completed in 2023: “Rock, Soil, Clay, and Seedling: Reimagining Landscapes as Ecologies of Justice in Contemporary Art by Otobong Nkanga, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Jade Montserrat, and jackie sumell”
crystal am nelson
Assistant Professor of Art History, CU Boulder
Dissertation completed in 2021: “The Audacity of Pleasure: On Social Life and the Creation of Safe Space in Black Romanticism”
Rachel Nelson
Director, Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz
Dissertation completed in 2016: “At the Edge of Ruin: Seeing Art Under Perpetual Conflict”
Jordan Reznick
Assistant Professor of American Studies at Grinnell College
Dissertation completed in 2020: “Settler Modernism: Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage and the Vicissitudes of Whiteness, 1890-1930”
Website: http://www.jordanreznick.com
Catherine Ries
Dissertation completed in 2024: “Regimes of Femininity: Representations of Javanese Women in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture”
Diana C Rose
Independent Scholar
Dissertation completed in 2017: “Living Time, Performing Memory: Maya Ceremonies of Foundation and Renewal”
Tatiane Santa Rosa
Program Manager, Visualizing Abolition, Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz
Dissertation completed in 2023: “Reclaiming Representations: Transnational Photographic Practices from Brazil and the Challenging of Mestiçagem and Branquitude”
Ellen Haruko Takata
Dissertation completed in 2021: “Stories from the Empty Space: Multinarrative Ethics of Postwar Responsibility Through the Photobooks of Seiichi Furuya, 1981-2017”
Mary Thomas
Director of Programs, U.S. Latinx Art Forum
Dissertation completed in 2017: “Enacted Sites: Art and the Visualization of Spatial Justice in Los Angeles, 1966-2014”
Kris Timken
Writer, Artist and Educator
Dissertation completed in 2020: “”Women, Land Art and the Social (1978-83)”
Madison Treece
Professor of Art History, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA
Dissertation completed in 2024: “Visceral Landscapes: Recuperating Migrant Narratives in Contemporary Photography of the U.S.- Mexico Border”
Maggie Wander
Assistant Professor of Art History in the department of Art and Art History, Santa Clara University
Dissertation completed in 2024: “Materializing History: Contemporary Art and the Temporalities of Climate Change in Oceania”
Michelle Yee
Assistant Professor of Global Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History, Virginia Commonwealth University
Dissertation completed in 2021: “Of Being In-Between: Reconfiguring the Asian American Body as Site/Sight of (In)Difference”
