Alumni

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...

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.

Miriam Said

Miriam Said (2011) earned her B.A. in art history from Syracuse University in 2009, and focuses on art of the ancient near east and the early Greek period. Her research interests include art of the first millennium with a focus on near eastern cultural cross-roads and interaction with the Eastern Mediterranean world; ritual and religion, and the representation and function of hybrid beings in art. 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...

Jenny Sakai

Jenny Sakai completed her dissertation, entitled Undoing Architecture: Temporalities of Painted Space in Early Modern Amsterdam, and was hooded at the spring 2014 commencement and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Kenyon College. She received her BA from U.C. 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...

Alexa Sand

Alexa Sand is Professor of Art History and Associate Vice President of Research/Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at Utah State University, where she has been on the faculty since 2004. She is a medievalist with a specialization in francophone word-and-image studies. She is the author of Vision, Devotion, and Self Representation in Late Medieval Art (Cambridge, 2014), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. She currently directs undergraduate and graduate research support programs at USU, and is an active member of the International Center of...

Sandra Sardjono

Sandra Sardjono (2009) studies the art and visual culture of Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on Indonesia. She is currently writing a dissertation on the depictions of textiles in Java from the Hindu-Buddhist period, 8th-15th century. She spent the last couple of years conducting research in the Netherlands as Visiting Scholar in the Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University. She earned her B.A. from Bowdoin College in Maine and an M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She served as Textile Conservator at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in...