Alumni

Delphine Sims

Delphine Sims studies the history of photography in the Americas. She earned a B.A. in Art History and African American Studies from the University of Southern California in 2013. Her research focuses on the ways in which race, gender, geography, and urbanity inform landscape photography. She previously worked at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art as the Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Photography. There, she organized exhibitions and contributed writings on subjects such as the history of salted paper prints, California landscape photography, mid-20th-century Mexican photography,...

Jon Soriano

Jon Soriano (2012) studies the arts of East and Central Asia, with a particular interest in Buddhist concepts of space and script during the Qing Dynasty. Jon has an MA in Asian studies from CSULB and an MA in ethnology from Cheng-Chi University, and has worked as a researcher at the National Palace Museum in Taipei and as a Chinese-to-English translator. Jon is currently the recipient of a Eugene Cota-Robles fellowship. A recent work appears in the journal Room 1000.

Jessica Stair

Jessica Stair (PhD 2018) specializes in the visual culture of colonial Latin America. She was co-advised by Todd Olson and Lisa Trever. Her dissertation “Indigenous Literacies in the Techialoyan Manuscripts of New Spain” considers a corpus of Central Mexican community documents in which late-colonial artists and scribes invented new iconographies and modes of reading and writing that derived from pre-Columbian, early colonial, and European traditions. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate affiliated with the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown...

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 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 recently he is...

Uranchimeg Tsultem

Uranchimeg (Orna) Tsultem (Ph.D. 2009) taught courses on contemporary art and Buddhist art at the Department of Art History at the National University of Mongolia in fall 2013 as an Associate Professor and a Khyentse Foundation Fellow. In spring 2014, Orna also taught a seminar on Asian contemporary art for the department.

She organized a panel on Mongolian Buddhist art at the International Association of Tibetan Studies held in Ulaanbaatar in July 2013, where her Ph.D. advisor Pat Berger joined as a Discussant. Orna submitted...

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:...