Alumni

Bibiana Obler

Bibiana Obler (Ph.D. 2006) is associate professor of art history at George Washington University, where she has taught since 2008. She serves as the arts editor for Feminist Studies. Publications include Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Arp and Taeuber (Yale University Press, 2014); Fast Fashion / Slow Art, edited with Phyllis Rosenzweig (Scala, 2019); and “Lynda Benglis: Jack of All Trades,” in Lynda Benglis (Phaidon, 2022).

Shalon Parker

Shalon Parker (2003) is professor of art history at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, where she teaches courses on 19th-20th c. art. Her book, Painting the Prehistoric Body in Late Nineteenth-Century France, was published by University of Delaware Press in 2018. She recently concluded a nine-year stint as the Art Dept. Chair and will be on sabbatical in 2019-20, embarking upon a new research project on the American photographer Consuelo Kanaga.

Jessica Patterson

Jessica Lee Patterson (2009) is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of San Diego, where she teaches courses that explore various aspects of Asian and modern art. Her research focuses on connections between East and Southeast Asia in the Buddhist art of the nineteenth century.

Stephanie Pearson

Stephanie Pearson (2007) studies ancient Roman art, with a focus on wall painting. Her research concerns cross-cultural interactions, concepts of luxury and exoticism, and artistic technique. Museums are another key theme in her work. Stephanie has excavated with the Via Consolare Project in Pompeii and worked in the Berlin Antikensammlung.

http://www.stephpearson.com/

Kailani Polzak

Kailani Polzak (2008) is a Ph.D. candidate working on British, French, and Russian voyages to the Pacific and the picturing of human difference in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She spent the past year in New Zealand, France, and Germany with the support of the History of Art Department as well as fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the Georges Lurcy foundation. Kailani will finish her tenure as an International Dissertation Research Fellow with the SSRC this fall, dividing the semester between research sites in the United Kingdom and Australia. She is...

Yessica Liliana Porras

Yessica Porras (2015) is a first-year PhD student focusing on Colonial Latin American art. After years away from her native country of Colombia, she developed an interest in art history as a way of learning more about her culture and expanding the knowledge of this understudied area. She is looking forward to beginning her work under the guidance of Todd Olson and Lisa Trever. She graduated from UC Berkeley in 2014. Here she developed an interest in the intersection between colonial and indigenous cultures,
represented in in her Honors Thesis Church of St. John the Baptist at Sutatausa...

Todd Presner

Todd Presner just published a new book, HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (Harvard University Press, 2014), with colleagues David Shepard and Yoh Kawano. A digital platform transmogrified into a book, it explains the ambitious online project of the same name that maps the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment. The authors examine the media archaeology of Google Earth and the cultural–historical meaning of map projections, and explore recent events—the “Arab Spring” and the Fukushima nuclear power plant...

Laura Richard

Laura’s (2008) field is Modern and Contemporary Art with a Designated Emphasis in Film. This past spring she taught a course on installation art, and last summer her article, "Anthony McCall: The Long Shadow of Ambient Light"appeared in the Oxford Art Journal. She was the volume editor of State of Mind: New California circa 1970 (UC Press, 2011) and, since 2009, has been the co-coordinator of the Townsend Working Group in Contemporary Art at UC Berkeley, whose mission is to foster interdisciplinary and inter-institutional...

Mark Rosen

Mark Rosen’s book, The Mapping of Power in Renaissance Italy, was published by Cambridge University Press in late 2014. He is Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and part of its newly formed Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History. His piece on Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori will appear in the March 2015 issue of The Art Bulletin. He is jealous of those who continue to live in Berkeley.

Sasha Rossman

Sasha grew up in Berkeley and Switzerland. He left the Bay Area in the late 90s to study art history and art practice on the East Coast and in Germany, where he worked in contemporary art for many years and also studied at Berlin’s Freie and Humboldt Universities. He then returned to Berkeley to study art, architecture, film, philosophy, critical theory and literary theory across numerous departments- focusing on constructions of space, temporality and history across media.