Graduate Student

Karla Mendez

Karla Mendez (2025) studies modern and contemporary art of the Americas with a focus on Black and Latin American women’s cultural production. She earned her B.A. in English from the University of Central Florida and her M.A. in American Studies from Brown University. Her writing has appeared in the Birmingham Museum of Art, Ampersand: An American Studies Journal, and the anthology We Are Each Other’s Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities. She also contributed to Black Feminism Lives!: A Summit Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the National Black Feminist Organization and...

Brishti Modak

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 Morales-Bernabe

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...

Madeleine Morris

Madeleine Morris (2022) studies twentieth-century art of the United States with a focus on the interactions between folk art and modernism. She received her MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, in 2022 where she researched interwar US folk and outlier art. Madeleine received a BA in Studio Art and Italian from Vassar College in 2014 and served as the director of Davis & Langdale Company, an art gallery in New York City, from 2016 through 2021. Her research interests include cultural exchange across North American borders, nationalism and national identity, and the...

Atineh Movsesian

Atineh Movsesian (2022) specializes in Medieval Armenian Art and Architecture. Her research concerns the interactions across medieval Armenia, Byzantium, and the Islamic worlds. She aims to bring awareness to the connected and global dimensions of Armenian art and architecture.

Atineh earned her BA in Art History from the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (2019), with minors in English and French. Her undergraduate thesis, “The Medieval City of Ani: Above and Underground,” offered initial art historical examination of the Ani caves and earned an outstanding research...

Tausif Noor

Tausif Noor studies global modern and contemporary art with a focus on South Asia and its histories of decolonization. His research interests broadly concern modernism's imbrication with nationalism and internationalism, postcolonialism, and Marxist thought. He is at work on a dissertation that charts a critical history of modernist visual practices and their entanglements with humanist philosophy and humanitarianism during East Pakistan’s transition to independent Bangladesh, between the 1947 Partition of India and the aftermath of the 1971 Liberation War....

Abigail O'Donnell

My research interests are centered around the art and architecture of the Mediterranean World in the Late Antique and Early Medieval periods, especially on issues of materiality, cross-cultural interactions, and historiography and theory. In 2023, I graduated from Ohio State University with two B.A.s in History and History of Art.

My most current research focused on a Late Antique silver plaque of Saint Simeon the Elder. Raising new questions regarding the plaque’s purpose and phenomenological effect on the viewer, and paying special attention to the material of the object, I...

Angela Pastorelli-Sosa

Angela (2018) studies modern and contemporary Latinx and Latin American printmaking and paper communities. Her research focuses on post-war artist networks that explore the conceptual underpinnings of paper to engage in transnational dialogues about liberation, history, and identity. She received her BA in Art History from Williams College in 2016, and subsequently spent a year in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Drawings and Prints department before going on to work at Rosenberg & Co. art gallery in New York.

Ariana Pemberton

Ariana Pemberton (2018) studies Art and Material History of Medieval South Asia and the Indian Ocean World. Her interests include trans-regional exchanges across the Indian Ocean, eco-conscious histories of non-human animals and the environment, and the use of materiality-based methodologies. She is currently writing her dissertation on South Asian ivory carved objects and the ivory trade of the Indian Ocean world between the eighth and fifteenth centuries CE. She received her BA from UC Berkeley in 2017. In 2022, she completed her MA thesis on the Firuz Minar, a brick and...

Ellie Penner

Eloisa Penner (2024) studies modern Art History of South Asia. She earned her B.A. in the History of Art from Washington and Lee University before becoming a Boren scholar in Hindi language studies. She has worked on a mural restoration team in Mustang, Nepal, and as a researcher for the digital humanities project “Florence as it Was,” using 3D modeling to imagine medieval spaces. Ellie also worked on a research team studying Buddhist shrines in Ladakh, India.

Ellie is interested in how visual forms manipulate perspectives of world order. Her research looks into global commissions...