Joseph Albanese (2018) studies Latin-American religious images and their connections to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Northern European artworks. His dissertation, which is supervised jointly by Elizabeth Honig and Todd Olson, will examine Marian Statue Paintings from Peru to shed light on previously unexplored intersections of materiality and devotion in the Spanish Viceroyalties and Europe.
Joseph graduated with his double BA in Art History, History, and Spanish Literature from the George Washington University in 2017 and MA in Early Northern European Art from The Courtauld...
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 studies the concept of cultural heritage in California and how museums, monuments, murals, and other elements of public visual and material culture interact with that concept, especially in regard to transpacific immigration in the 20th century. She is interested in evolving vernacular and institutional interpretations of history through art and architecture, particularly at intersections of memory and public space, as well as in cultural hybridity and constructions of American identity and citizenship. She holds a BA and MA in U.S. History from Stanford University and...
Lesdi C. Goussen Robleto is a Ph.D. student in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on the historical and contemporary conditions of Central American art with an emphasis on women artists practicing during the tumultuous period of the Central American crisis in the late twentieth century. By looking closely at both the inter-war and post-war years, she explores artmaking as an embodied practice of resistance, refuge and social critique. Her research engages with women of color feminisms, Latin American and Latinx studies,...
Claire Ittner studies twentieth-century modernisms, with an emphasis on the arts of America and the African diaspora. Her research interests include the spaces of creation and display, race and national identity, questions of influence, and archival theory and practice. She earned a B.A. from Davidson College in 2013.
Vanessa Jackson (2019) studies 18th and 19th century European art, specifically art created in Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary France. She earned a double B.A. in the History of Art and French from UC Berkeley in 2019. Here, she developed a great interest in the politics of race and gender not only within the visual arts of France, but in Literature as well. Building on her undergraduate studies, Vanessa’s research focuses on visual and literary representations of the black body during the long 19th century.
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...