Alumni

Letha Ch'ien

Letha Ch’ien (PhD 2014) is an associate professor of Art History at Sonoma State University
where she continues to teach Race and European Art plus the more expected courses. She
will be on leave academic year ’24-’25 with an NEH fellowship to work on her book on
polytopos in medieval and early modern Venetian art and culture. Ch’ien continues to write
public art history for outlets including Smarthistory and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Wen-Shing Chou

Wen-Shing Chou (2011) is assistant professor of East Asian art history at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). She and her husband welcomed the arrival of their daughter Beatrice in September of 2013. When she manages to peel herself away from watching the miracles of the baby’s growth, she works toward finishing her book manuscript on miraculous visions of the sacred mountain range of Wutai in Late Imperial and Modern China. Her article on early twentieth century...

William Coleman

Will Coleman (PhD 2015) is in his second year as Wyeth Foundation Curator and Director, Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center at the Brandywine Museum of Art, with additional responsibilities for staff and collections at the Farnsworth Art Museum. In the whirlwind start up period of this newly created role, he opened a new research and collections storage facility that is now accepting in-person and virtual study visits, published three exhibition catalogues including Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth’s Botanical Imagination (Brandywine, 2023), and launched a number of traveling...

Rebekah Compton

Rebekah Compton’s co-edited volume Magical Materials in Renaissance Philosophy, Literature, and Art was published in 2022. In 2023, she completed an article on the environmental art history of Camaldoli and on the graphic designs of Santa Maria degli Angeli’s illuminated choral books. In the summer of 2024, Rebekah will be researching a project on the Camaldolese Monasteries of St. Michael in Venice and Istria, a project funded by the Delmas Foundation, which received the distinction of the Henry A. Millon Award for Art and Architecture.

Huey Copeland

During his 2013-14 ACLS Fellowship year, Huey Copeland (’06) celebrated the publication of his first book with the University of Chicago Press, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America, while making strides on his new project, currently titled In the Arms of the Negress: Race, Gender, and the Unmaking of Modern Art. He also co-edited a special issue of Nka on “Black Collectivities”; published shorter pieces on artists Eleanor Antin, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Theaster Gates, Dave...

Sharon Corwin

Sharon Corwin (Ph.D. 2001) is President and CEO of the Terra Foundation for American Art. Under her leadership, the foundation announced its new guiding mission, vision, and values in 2022 that reflect a commitment to projects that expand narratives of American art. Before arriving at the Terra Foundation in 2020, she served as Director and Chief Curator at the Colby College Museum of Art from 2006-2020. She has published several books and essays, including, Five American Painters: Conversations with Lois Dodd, Rackstraw Downes, David Driskell, Yvonne Jacquette, and Alex Katz...

Alexandra Courtois de Vicose

Alexandra Courtois (2009) studies 19th century French art. Her interests encompass a variety of media, (including painting, drawing, printing processes and photography, all relevant to her dissertation research on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec), as well as Disability Studies, proving to be a productive framework to analyze Lautrec’s oeuvre and life in a new light.

Sarah Cowan

Sarah Louise Cowan (PhD 2019) is an assistant professor of art history at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. She studies how questions about race and gender have haunted modern and contemporary art and visual culture in the Americas. She researches modern and contemporary art of the Americas with a focus on the African diaspora. Her current book project, the first scholarly monograph on artist Howardena Pindell, develops the idea of Black feminist modernisms. This project received a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend in 2020. Her second project will examine...

Matt Culler

Matthew Culler (PhD 2020) studies early modern art with a 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.

Jessica Dandona

Jessica M. Dandona (Ph.D. 2010) is Associate Professor of Liberal Arts at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where she teaches courses in 19th- and 20th-century art and visual culture. Her book, Nature and the Nation in Fin-de-Siècle France: The Art of Emile Gallé, was published by Routledge in 2017. She is on sabbatical in 2018-19 and will spend the year in Dundee, Scotland as a US-UK Fulbright Scholar. Other recent awards include fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Countway Library at Harvard, the Osler Library at McGill University, the Library...