The History of Art Department's Current Graduate Students

Information on some (but not all) of the accomplished members of our graduate program
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Mont Mont Allen

Mont Allen studies the art of ancient Greece and Rome, with the latter exerting the stronger pull on his heartstrings. Particular passions include mythological imagery in funerary art (especially Greek myths as they were carved on Roman sarcophagi) and ancient attitudes towards artistic facture and technique (notably as they bear on questions of iconography).  He is often spotted bicycling up and down the Berkeley Hills, his preferred local habitat. He is also something of a Teutonophile and confesses, rather sheepishly, to having occasionally taught the stylistic dating of Greek monuments through analogy with German synthesizer music.  2012-2013 will see him in Berlin for the year, pursuing dissertation research at the German Archaeological Institute, thanks to generous fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service and the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation.   To see Mont's CV.
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Erin Babnik Erin Babnik (2002) recently completed a series of entries on Greek sculptors for the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Ancient Greece and Rome (OUP, forthcoming). She is currently researching a dissertation on athletic art of the Hellenistic period. Her academic interests include Gallic representations in Greek art, Roman ideal sculpture, Hellenistic paradeisoi, text/image relationships, and pedagogy. Erin is a photography enthusiast and has been amassing a personal photo archive for teaching and publication that now exceeds 30,000 images. Her other interests include running, cycling, hiking, and traveling to countries with very bad roads and large quantities of under-published antiquities.
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Coleman William L. Coleman

Will (2009) advanced to candidacy in August 2011 and spent the fall at the Huntington Library as Robert R. Wark Fellow. With the supervision of Professors Lovell and Honig, he works on landscape painting and country houses in England and the United States with irreconcilable side interests in Rubens, Finland, Stoicism, Quakerism, and fin-de-siècle music at the edges of Europe. He earned his BA from Haverford College in 2007, an MA from the Courtauld Institute in 2008, both in History of Art, and an MSt in Musicology from New College, Oxford in 2009. He's an avid telemark skier, squash and lacrosse player, and an active member of the Society for Cultural Heritage, Arts, and the Law.
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Alexandra Courtois From 2011 Newsletter: Alexandra Courtois (2009) is especially thankful for the past academic year. In addition to receiving a J.K. Javits Fellowship and being co-GSI with Kailani Polzak for Darcy Grigsby’s “Spectacle of Modernity,” participating in the Stronach Travel Seminar to Rome was a truly memorable experience! She’ll usher in summer by participating in a week-long seminar at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) about the artist’s studio (18th c. and 19th c.). Although a British topic is a departure from her focus in 19th c. French Art, the timing is perfect, as her upcoming Qualifying Paper deals with Lady Hamilton’s “Attitudes.” After spending last summer working closely with curator Philippe Saunier at the Musée d’Orsay doing archival research and photographing Degas pastels in the museum reserves (!), this summer will be dedicated to her QP… and perhaps a trip to China!
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Matthew Culler Matthew Culler (2009) studies early modern art with particular interest in Italian art and art theory.He received a B.A. from Kenyon College and an M.A. from the University of North Carolina in 2007.
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Karine Karine Douplitzky

Karine Douplitzky (2011) was born and raised in France and recently moved to the Bay area. She has a non-typical profile: a MA in Engineering and a MA in Film Studies, followed by many years as a documentary film director. One of her favorite subjects was the History of Paper: she wrote a book on the topic, as well as several articles on related themes such as the power of media. She then spent a year in Japan teaching French literature and cinema. Karine will start the PhD program at Berkeley in the fall, and study under Professor Elisabeth Honig. She is particularly interested in Dutch and Flemish art and hopes to continue research on the question of the Smile. She has eclectic interests, including photography, elaborating themed exhibits and restoring a 12th-century prieuré in France.
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Elizabeth Ferrell Elizabeth Ferrell received her B.A. in Art History from Grinnell College in 2003. She wrote her M.A. thesis on Maria Eichhorn's “financial artworks” at Berkeley in 2006. Her dissertation, “Collaborated Lives: Individualism and Collectivity in the San Francisco Avant-Garde,” explores the collaborative social and aesthetic practices that developed within the circle of artists - that included Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Bruce Conner, and Wallace Berman - who lived and worked in the city's Fillmore neighborhood in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
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Aglaya Glebova From 2011 Newsletter: Aglaya Glebova (2008) delivered three papers over the course of the last year, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Emerging Scholars Symposium in January and at Yale University’s Russian Art 1770-1920 Symposium in March (at the invitation of a Berkeley Slavic Department Ph.D., Molly Brunson). She was honored to serve on the Department’s Modernist Job Search Committee, and would like once again to convey her thanks to her fellow graduate student colleagues for their support, help, and involvement in the process. She is now researching her dissertation in Russia. While Moscow will remain her home base, she will be traveling further North to the Finnish border to dig into the local archives, and see the landscape on which she is writing. Through it all, she has been updating the Department’s Facebook page, which she invites you to “like.”
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Greenwold Diana Greenwold

Diana passed her qualifying exams in March and is pursuing research on her dissertation, which deals with art and craft production and exhibition in American settlement houses. She continues her work on projects dealing with Native American art and museum practice. Diana also teaches writing at San Quentin through the Prison University Project.
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Andrew Griebler Andrew Griebeler (2010) studies medieval and byzantine art with Dr. Beate Fricke and Dr. Diliana Angelova. He received a B.A. in Art History and Biology at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. His research interests include iconoclasm, spoliation, ecclesiology, theology, medieval science and image theory. Over the past academic year, he presented papers at the Byzantine Studies Conference in Chicago and at the Medieval association of the Pacific Conference in Santa Clara.
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Grace Grace Harpster

Grace Harpster (2011) received a B.A. in Art History and German at Tulane University in New Orleans, and will be starting the PhD program at Berkeley in the fall. She studies early modern Italian art, and will be working primarily with Dr. Todd Olson. Grace is particularly interested in the relationship between art and religion in Counter-Reformation Rome, with an emphasis on Jesuit and Oratorian commissions in the late sixteenth century. She hopes to continue research on the significance of martyrdom during this period, such as those depicted in Circignani's gory frescos at Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome. In her free time, Grace enjoys traveling and playing guitar (sometimes for the band Tinkture).
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Edwin Harvey A 2010-11 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellow in American Art, Edwin is writing a dissertation on the subject of “Place, Tradition, and Modernity in the Art of Andrew Wyeth.” He conducts fieldwork in Pennsylvania and Maine, and in Berkeley's libraries he pursues the tangled thread of place within twentieth-century art, cultural, and intellectual history. To contact Edwin.
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Josie Lopez Josie Lopez is a PhD candidate currently conducting research in New Mexico and Mexico.  Her dissertation is an examination of nineteenth-century Mexican satirical prints and their interaction with Goya and Daumier.
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Ma William H. Ma

William H. Ma (2008) studies the artistic and cultural interactions between the West and China during the late imperial period. His current project examines the role that Jesuit Institutions such as the Shanghai Catholic Orphanage (Tushanwan) played in the transmission of Western artistic techniques and ideologies and in the presentation of "China" in World Expositions. After earning a B.A. from Cal in the History of Art and Integrative Biology in 2006, William has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, the Las Vegas Art Museum, and the UC Museum of Paleontology. When not working at a coffee shop or conducting research in the library, he can be found at the nearest opera house.
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Marcus Daniel Marcus

Daniel Marcus (2007) is in Paris until further notice. He will mail you a flattened, laminated croissant if you ask him. When not causing havoc at the customs office, he is writing a dissertation on Fernand Léger and Le Corbusier in the interwar years, focusing on questions related to pictorial space, objecthood, and abstraction (he can be more specific if asked in person or emailed). He has published on Picasso's Guernica in Picasso Harlequin, 1917-1937 and co-authored an essay with Erica Levin on the precariousness of work in contemporary art. Time spent in Paris in the summer of 2009 gave him the idea of writing on the motif of the face in postwar painting, something he has finally done; the essay, titled "Year Zero, 1946," is forthcoming in Artforum. Before coming to the Bay Area, he was Assistant Curator at the Swiss Institute in New York. In his free time he likes to hatch vague schemes of bringing a taco truck to Paris.
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Laure Laure Marest-Caffey

Laure Marest-Caffey (2010) is a second-year student specializing in ancient Greek art with a particular interest in engraved gems. Before being dazzled by these works of art in miniature, she studied history and art history at the Sorbonne University in Paris and at California State University, Northridge, and worked for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. This year, she submitted her qualifying papers on the Marlborough gem and on the reception of forgeries in the eighteenth century, and her dissertation prospectus on Hellenistic glyptic portraiture. She also presented a paper entitled "D'Hancarville's Erotic Gems: Antics and Antiquarian Identity in the Eighteenth Century" at the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. During the summer, she will participate in the Eric P. Neuman Graduate Seminar in Numismatics in New York, supported by the American Numismatic Society, and travel to Turkey and France for research. When she is not looking at bling or dirt, Laure enjoys exploring the American West, doing yoga, cooking and tasting food from all over the world--but admits a weakness for cheese, Frenchness oblige!
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Camille Mathieu Camille Mathieu (2007) is currently researching her dissertation, which will explore the international artistic community in Napoleonic Rome, in Europe. She is advised by Darcy Grigsby and supported by a Theodore Rousseau Fellowship.
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Micki McCoy Micki McCoy (2009) studies the visual arts of China and Inner Asia. Her developing dissertation project concerns the heavens in the arts of broadly the Liao-Yuan dynasties (10th-14th centuries). She is currently researching this on the western edge of the Gobi Desert at the Mogao Grottoes, a cliffside stretch of nearly 500 extant decorated Buddhist devotional caves whose production spanned roughly the fourth-14th centuries. Before graduate school, Micki worked as a contemporary art writer in Shanghai. She received a BFA in sculpture from Pratt Institute and an MA in Art History from UC Davis.
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McFadden Elizabeth McFadden

Elizabeth McFadden (2011) is a first year doctoral student at Berkeley and will be studying under Professor Elizabeth Honig. Her interests lie in early modern constructions of gender, the promotion of a national or regional identity through fashion and goods, the appropriation and transformation of the exotic, and self-representation through dress in the Baroque and Rococo periods. She earned her BA at Hood College, where she majored in English and Art History, and later earned an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London where her course was concentrated in early modern print culture in Italy, France, and Spain. She also taught an early modern print course at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. Like her advisor, Professor Honig, she was fascinated by her namesake, Elizabeth I, as a teenager, and in her hopes to emulate the queen in some way, she took up learning languages and playing the harpsichord (the closest instrument she could find to a virginal). She adores all things kawaii and collects Japanese stationery. Visit her blog, Amma's Pâtisserie.
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Kappy Kappy Mintie

Katherine "Kappy" Mintie (2011) is thrilled to start her first year of the Ph.D. program at Berkeley this fall. She plans on specializing in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American art under the supervision of Margaretta Lovell. Kappy received her B.A. from Vassar College in 2009 and has spent the last two years living and working for an arts non-profit in her native Los Angeles. In her free time, she enjoys making mix tapes for friends and playing Scrabble.
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Ollie photo Oliver O'Donnell

Oliver O'Donnell (2011) is interested in the history of art history and the history of aesthetics as they relate to a broad definition of modern art. His present research focuses specifically on the Anglo-American tradition of art writing in the 19th century and how it impacted the conditions of artistic production. This past June he presented a paper on Charles Eliot Norton and he is currently developing it as well as his broader interests under the guidance of Professor Whitney Davis.
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Stephanie Stephanie Pearson

Stephanie is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Pompeian studies and Egyptian appropriations in Roman wall-painting. Cross-cultural interaction and artistic technique and process are among her main research interests (hence the subject of her M.A. thesis, the sculptural technique of Gandharan reliefs). For her field research, Stephanie has been lucky enough to work with the Via Consolare Project in Pompeii for the past four years. She is very active in the Archaeological Institute of America, having chaired sessions and presented papers in a number of the annual conferences, and continues to oversee the Student Affairs Interest Group. More locally, she has had the pleasure of lecturing for Humanities West and the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Stephanie’s non-academic passions include hobbyist-field biology, salads, most anything French or Italian, and basking lizardlike in the California sunshine.   To see Stephanie's CV.
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Kailani Polzak From 2011 Newsletter: Kailani Polzak (2008) taught for the first time this year and completed her Qualifying Paper on Goya’s Second of May 1808. She also participated in Professor Grigsby’s Race Workshop (fall) and Rome in Ruins travel seminar (spring). She is now working on her dissertation prospectus and looks forward to spending the summer reading and writing about the illustration of voyage narratives in nineteenth-century Europe.
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Miriam Miriam Said

Miriam Said (2011) earned her B.A. in art history from Syracuse University in 2009, and will be focusing on art of the ancient Near East under Marian Feldman. Her research interests include art of the middle and late bronze ages with a focus on near eastern cultural cross-roads and interaction with Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean world. She is also particularly interested in issues of cultural heritage and repatriation, which she hopes to explore in more depth in the coming years. Miriam most recently hails from New York where she spent the last two years working at both The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art. During her free time, Miriam is normally engrossed in epic fantasy fiction, consuming vast amounts of frozen yogurt, or attempting a yoga class.
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Jenny Sakai Jenny Sakai is currently living in Amsterdam and working on her dissertation entitled “Amsterdam in Ruins: Painting and the Imagining of Urban Space, 1648-1700.” She received her BA from UC Berkeley and an MA from Columbia (Art History and Archaeology), and is the recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship and the two-year Kress Institutional Fellowship in European Art. Jenny's field of study is early modern Northern art, and her advisors are Elizabeth Honig, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, and Todd Olson. Her research interests include early modern urbanism, decay and abjection, iconoclasm, reception, the status of representation, materiality, and the relationship between power and painting.
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Sethi Cristin McKnight Sethi

Cristin McKnight Sethi (2008) focuses on South Asian art of the early modern to contemporary periods. Her interests include photography, textiles, global histories of collecting and exhibiting South Asian objects, art made during the British Raj, and the politics and art historical predicament of craft. Cristin was awarded an M.A. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in Art and Visual Culture from Bates College. She has lived in India while researching kalamkari textiles as a Fulbright Fellow, and while studying Hindi as a FLAS Fellow. She is currently researching and writing her dissertation on phulkari embroidery from Punjab under the guidance of Professor Joanna Williams. She is funded by a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship.
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Sousa Marcelo Sousa

Marcelo Sousa (2007) is originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He completed his BA in Art History at the University of Southern California. His areas of interest include early modern art and photography. His dissertation explores how nineteenth and twentieth-century homoerotically determined communities in Brazil recreated their indigenous, colonial, and post-colonial pasts by assimilating the recursions of Western iconographic motifs. Marcelo also works at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a private guide, and in his spare time, volunteers at the GLBT Historical Society. In 2008, he was part of the curatorial team for the exhibition “Passionate Struggles” which remained on view at the Castro Museum from October 2008 to November 2009. For the past three years he has also curated the silent art auction for the GLBT Historical Society Gala Fundraiser.
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Stewart Jessica Stair

Jessica (2010) studies the art of early modern Spain and Italy with particular interest in seventeenth-century Naples. Her research focuses on questions of materiality and representation, as well as the Spanish viceregal impact on cultural production. Jessica is also interested in the Spanish presence across the Atlantic during the early modern period and explores questions related to cross cultural exchange and the organization of social hierarchies in the art of colonial Latin America.
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Stewart Jessica Stewart

Jessica is a PhD candidate, specializing in early sixteenth-century Netherlandish art and cultural exchange. Supervised by Professors Elizabeth Honig, Todd Olson, and Darcy Grigsby, her dissertation, "Rules of Engagement: Art, Commerce, and Diplomacy in Golden-Age Antwerp," studies the art collections of three foreign merchants in Antwerp and their proximity to specific knowledge communities. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the Belgian American Educational Foundation, and the Kress Foundation to support her research abroad. In her free time, she can be found hiking in the Oakland hills with her partner, Gilles, and their adopted Italian Greyhound, Kobe. Having flirted in her youth with the idea of going to film school, Jessica also considers herself to be a bit of a film-buff. She has a penchant for post-Neo-realist Italian cinema, the French New Wave, New German Cinema, and just about anything directed by Bergman, Fellini, Resnais, and Fassbinder. Prospective students and other friends of the department should feel free to contact Jessica at the following link.
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Caty Telfair Caty Telfair will be in Paris until July of 2011, continuing research for her dissertation about Symbolist portraiture. Her article "Interiors: Odilon Redon's Portraits of the Baroness de Domecy" will appear in a special edition of the University of Helsinki's publication Studies in Art History/Taidehistoriallisia tutkimuksia in the autumn.
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Yasmine Yasmine Van Pee

Yasmine Van Pee studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular interest in colonial and post-colonial Africa. Her dissertation is titled "Phantom Africa: Constructing the Colonial Imaginary in Belgium and Congo, 1885-1975" and focuses on the work of Herzekiah Andrew Shanu, Gaston-Denys Perier and Marcel Broodthaers. She originally hails from Belgium, where she received a B.A. in Archaeology from Ghent University and a degree in Conservation of Contemporary Art from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Ghent. She was awarded an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, where she wrote her thesis "Boredom is Always Counterrevolutionary" on the downtown New York arts and music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In her free time she enjoys vintage motorcycles and surfing.
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Elaine Yau Elaine Yau (2007) is currently conducting research for her dissertation, which investigates Sister Gertrude Morgan's painting and performance practice alongside the racial politics of the twentieth-century folk art field during the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. She also serves as the review editor for Cultural Analysis, an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to investigating expressive and everyday culture. Other interests include theories of the vernacular and traditionality, visual anthropology, American genre painting, and the material culture of place.
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Patricia Patricia Yu

Patricia Yu is a first year doctoral student in Chinese art history and looks forward to working with Professor Pat Berger on the visual culture of the Qing dynasty and Republican China. Her research interests include the relationship between art and nationalism, China at the World's Fairs, and Asian textiles. She graduated from Pomona College in 2009 with a BA in History, a minor in Asian Studies, and a senior thesis titled "Fashioning China: Dress and Politics from the Qing Dynasty to the Cultural Revolution." For the last two years, she worked as the Collections Data Specialist at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College, where she managed the electronic collections catalog and spent quality time with the Gallery's Asian textiles and Japanese woodblock prints. When she isn't contemplating the fractal nature of Chinese gardens, she enjoys visiting Terry Pratchett's Discworld and wishing L-space really existed. She will destroy you in Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit.
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