Lily Callender (2023) studies the complex decisions that went into the design and decoration of early Christian spaces, and the way that religious shifts and doctrinal disputes influenced the adaptation of art and architecture in Late Antiquity. She earned her B.A. in Art and History of Art from UC Berkeley in 2022, before working as an educator at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego.
Her most recent research focuses on the complete sensorial experience of baptistries, and recovering how iconography, materiality, and ritual performance worked together to...
Michele D’Aurizio (2018) studies modern and contemporary art, with a focus on postwar Italy. His primary research interests include the cross-over between art and design (interior and furniture design and craft arts), the relationship between industry, technology, and art, and the political philosophy of Autonomism. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies from the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. Between 2014 and 2018, he worked as the editor of the contemporary art magazine Flash Art. In 2016, he co-curated the 16th Quadriennale d’Arte in Rome.
Ramón de Santiago researches the trans-Pacific transfer of visual and material culture between South Asia and Latin America in the Early Modern period, with a particular interest in pre-colonial systems of trade in both regions. His theoretical interests include questions of historiography in trans-oceanic systems and visual and material practices. His current project uses multidisciplinary methods to investigate the layers of exchange of objects, goods, and people through world oceanic systems.
Christine Delia (2020) earned her B.A. in Art History from UCLA (’15) and M.A. in Islamic Art and Architecture from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (’18). Christine researches modern art and artists working in Mexico, Morocco and the United States, with a particular focus on murals and other public art forms. Her dissertation, tentatively titled: "Mirror Effects: Fragmentation, Figuration, and Globality in Mexican, Moroccan, and US modern art, 1929-1949" examines three murals by Spanish artists dispersed around the world in the years surrounding the Spanish Civil War. The...
Elizabeth Fair (2019) studies cultural landscapes and ideas of heritage in California, especially in regard to transpacific migration, through evolving vernacular and institutional interpretations of art, architecture, and material culture. Her dissertation focuses on Chinese American architecture and architectural objects of the 19th and 20th centuries, and intersections with landscape, memory, and history, moving from Sacramento Valley 19th century temples to Angel Island to the San Francisco Chinatown YWCA. In 2024-5 she is a Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellow in American Art,...
Hannah Jasper (2024) is a Ph.D. student in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies 20th-century American visual culture, focusing on visual serial print media and its relationship to US-based resistance movements. Her research examines the relationship between aesthetics, authorship, and collective production. She is interested in studying the evident and hidden forms of self-determination and cultural production within independent publications and mass media. She holds a BFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. She previously served as...
Emily Kang (2022) studies early American visual culture, with a particular focus on the built environment and thematic interests in critical race theory, class, and nation-building. Her research focuses especially on 18th century art in the Americas and Britain, but she is also deeply invested in the politics of exchange within the circum-Atlantic sphere and beyond as she considers the dynamics of imperial and colonial visual culture. Emily received B.A.s in Art History and English Literature from the University of Chicago in 2021 before teaching English in Lyon, France through the...
Andrea Jung-An Liu (2018) studies Modern East Asian Art, with a focus on the artistic productions across the Japanese Empire. She takes a special interest in tracing the trans-national and trans-medial history of Japanese modern art while interrogating the formation of art historiography and art criticism in the first half of the twentieth century. She is also interested in critical and postcolonial theory, the politics of display, and the relationship between war, propaganda and art. Before moving to Berkeley for her PhD studies, she interned at MoMA in NYC and worked for the...
Brishti Modak (2023) studies the intersections between public sculpture, reception, and decolonization in twentieth-century India. Her research more broadly also looks into art institutional histories, materiality, and feminist art practice.
She has a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy from Presidency University (Kolkata) and a Masters' in Art History from Jamia Millia Islamia (New Delhi). In 2021, she earned her M.Phil. degree from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta in 2019. Since then, she has worked at Critical...
Kevin G. Morales-Bernabe (2023) studies the Arts and Material Culture of the Buddhist World. His research encompasses topics related to death, dying, funerary rituals, and the afterlife in artistic traditions within tantric religions of South Asia. Kevin’s interests also include trans-regional exchange and religious interactions across Medieval South Asia and the Himalayas.
Kevin earned his BA in Interdisciplinary Studies and Art History from the University of Puerto Rico – Río Piedras campus (2019). In 2021, he completed his MPhil from the...
