Alumni

Josephine Lopez

Josie Lopez (2009) is currently conducting research and writing her dissertation in New Mexico with the support of the SMU Eleanor Tufts Fellowship. Her dissertation examines nineteenth-century political satire and caricature in the prints of Mexican lithographer Constantino Escalante.

Amy Lyford

Amy Lyford (Ph.D. 1997) just published her third book entitled Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning (London: Reaktion Books, 2023; dist. in US by University of Chicago). Lyford is the Arthur G. Coons Professor in the History of Ideas at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

Vanessa Lyon

J. Vanessa Lyon (2011) is Associate Professor of Art History at Bennington College where she Directs the Visual Arts Lecture Series. Lyon’s first book Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens was published in 2020 (Amsterdam UP). In 2021, she was guest curator of Girl You Want, the inaugural exhibition of the contemporary art center ArtYard in Frenchtown, NJ. Lyon’s novel, The Groves is forthcoming as an Audible Original in 2021.

William Ma

William H. Ma (2016) is the assistant professor of Asian art history at Louisiana State University. He has
spent last year busy searching and presen>ng on his various projects. In May, he was in
Mar>nique to speak on a panel on decolonizing art history. A week later, he was in Prague
presen>ng a paper on the transla>on of dynas>c bronze urns from China to Vietnam to France,
followed by research trips to Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Brighton, and London to visit European
various chinoiserie interiors and export Chinese porcelain. In June, he was a fellow at the
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Heather Madar

Heather Madar currently serves as the Associate Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt. Her book Albrecht Dürer and the Depiction of Cultural Differences in Renaissance Europe was published by Routledge in 2023.

Daniel Marcus

Since 2020, Daniel Marcus has served dual roles as Associate Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts and Assistant Professor of Practice in History of Art at The Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio). In his curatorial position, he has curated several recent exhibitions, including To Begin, Again: A Prehistory of the Wex, 1968-89 and Sharing Circles: Carol Newhouse and the WomanShare Collective (both 2022); he also served as in-house curator for exhibitions with Jumana Manna and Jacqueline Humphries...

Laure Marest

Laure Marest (Ph.D. 2017) is the Cornelius and Emily Vermeule Assistant Curator of Greek and Roman Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She oversees with her colleagues one of the largest and most encyclopedic collections in the United States. She is currently working on several new permanent galleries and a catalog of the MFA’s world-class collection of ancient engraved gems. Laure received in 2018 an award from the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) for her research on social networks evidenced in the clay sealings excavated at Seleucia on the Tigris, Iraq. She has...

Elizabeth McFadden

Elizabeth McFadden (Ph.D. 2020) specializes in early modern fashion and dress. She wrote her dissertation on fur clothing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and Holland. In the past she has interned at The Museum at FIT and the V&A. She earned her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London where she was recently a Kress Fellow. She currently resides in Paris.

Cristin McKnight Sethi

Cristin McKnight Sethi (Ph.D., 2015) is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University where she teaches a variety of courses on visual and material culture from South and Southeast Asia. She is completing a book on the production, circulation, and display of embroidered textiles in pre- and post-Partition Punjab.

Ara H. Merjian

Ara H. Merjian is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History, New York University. He is the author of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Paris, Modernism (Yale University Press, 2014). Forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in 2019, and funded by a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant, is the new volume, Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism, 1960-1975. He is at work on a new book titled "The Mimesis...