Alumni

Deborah Stein

Professor Stein is the author of a recent book The Hegemony of Heritage: Ritual and the Record in Stone (open access and print paperback from UC Press 2018; and, hardcover art book from Mapin 2019). This work takes the reader on a journey back in time to four different periods to explore what the visual and inscriptional record can tell us about the same few Hindu and Jain temples in the Southern Rajasthan over the past one thousand years. Trained as a medievalist art historian of South Asian Art, Dr. Stein holds a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley and has taught widely...

Jessica Stevenson-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. Having...

Shivani Sud


Shivani Sud had an eventful year. After her big, fat South Asian wedding in December 2021, Shivani worked on completing her dissertation. In spring 2022, she enjoyed teaching her R1B course, Colonial Pasts, Decolonial Futures: South Asia in the Museum. She was excited to co-organize the panel “Imagined Geographies: (trans)regional visual practices in South and Southeast Asia” for the College Art Association’s annual conference and present her dissertation research at CAA’s conference as well as the 20th American Council of Southern Asian Art Symposium. Shivani is greatly looking...

Joel Thielen

Joel Thielen (PhD 2024) studies visual cultures of Japan from an ecocritical perspective. He received his bachelor’s degree in biology from Colorado College and spent three years working in Japan before joining the Berkeley History of Art Department in 2016. Joel’s interests lie in the emerging field of eco art history; he utilizes environmental histories, ecology, and geography to explore the relationships between our natural environments—including human-made “natural” environments—and the visual cultures of Japan during the early modern, modern, and contemporary periods. Most...

Uranchimeg Tsultem

Uranchimeg (Orna) Tsultem (Ph.D. 2009) is a scholar of Mongolian art and culture with an active research and curatorial practice in global contemporary art. Dr. Tsultem received her Ph.D. in East Asian and Himalayan art history from University of California, Berkeley in 2009, where she also taught and served as co-chair of the Mongolia Initiative Program at the Institute of East Asian Studies.

Dr. Tsultem has also taught at National University of Mongolia, Yonsei University in South Korea (as a visiting professor), and...

Ty Vanover

Ty Vanover (2017) studies 19th- and early 20th-century art, specializing in Central European visual culture, theories of sexuality, and histories of science and medicine.

His dissertation, “Graphic Impulses: Drawing, Sexuality, and Science in Germany, 1869-1933,” focuses on drawings produced by queer men in order to rethink the conceptual emergence of the modern homosexual in German discourse. Commencing from an examination of how drawings came to be linked to conceptions of “healthy” and “degenerate” sexual desire in the early nineteenth century, the dissertation pivots to analyze...

Marcus Verhagen

Marcus Verhagen (PhD 1994, advised by Carol Armstrong and T.J. Clark) wrote his doctoral thesis on late nineteenth-century French art and mass culture. Working primarily on contemporary art in the years since 2002, he has published articles and reviews in magazines, most regularly in Art Monthly, and in periodicals such as New Left Review and Third Text. He has written two books, Flows and Counterflows; Globalisation in Contemporary Art, which was published by Sternberg Press in 2017, and Viewing Velocities:...

Karl Whittington

Karl Whittington (Ph.D. 2010) is Associate Professor of History of Art at The Ohio State University, where he has been teaching medieval art history since 2010. His essays have appeared in Gesta, Studies in Iconography, Mediaevalia, postmedieval, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, The Gay and Lesbian Review, T...

Barbara Wisch

Barbara Wisch’s (PhD 1985) A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492–1692, edited by Pamela M. Jones, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Ditchfield, Brill’s Companions to European History 17 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), was chosen as the joint recipient of the 2020 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Reference Works by the Sixteenth Century Society & Conference, an international scholarly organization. Among the thirty multidisciplinary essays are “Building Brotherhood: Confraternal Piety, Patronage, and Place” by Wisch and “Printers and Publishers in Early...

Elaine Yau

Elaine Y. Yau (PhD 2015) is associate curator of the African American quilt collection at BAMPFA, where she is organizing an exhibition from Eli Leon’s historic bequest of approximately 3,000 quilts for fall 2024. She co-curated Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective in 2020 with Larry Rinder, an exhibition deepened her long-standing engagement with art at the intersection of discourses on folk art, vernacular culture, and modernism. She has published on Gertrude Morgan and Minnie Evans, and her critical essay on folk art was included in The...