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Vanessa Anderson
Contact: Vanessa_Anderson@Brown.edu
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Caitlin Bass
Caitlin received her BA in Art History from Smith College. She entered the Art History program at Brown in 2004, and received her MA in 2006 with a qualifying paper entitled: “Providence, John Hay Library BX 2000. A2 1519: An Investigation into its Classification, Date and Origin,” addressing a previously unresearched manuscript. Her dissertation, “Home Behind the Wall: the Living Spaces of Medieval German Convents,” analyses the living spaces, particularly dormitories and refectories, of the convents Ebstorf, Isenhagen, Lüne and Wienhausen in Northern Germany, in comparison with secular domestic architecture of the region. She is particularly interested in how these monastic and secular living spaces were used and endowed with meaning by their inhabitants. Caitlin’s research interests include medieval monastic and domestic architecture, the material culture of medieval Europe, and Islamic art, architecture and material culture.
Contact: Caitlin_Bass@Brown.edu |
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Yun Cai
Contact: Yun_Cai@Brown.edu |
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Mark DePalma
Contact: Mark_DePalma@Brown.edu |
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Elisa Foster
Elisa is a fourth-year graduate student focusing on Medieval and Early Modern French Sculpture. She received an MA in Art History from Southern Methodist University where she completed her thesis "The Writing on the Walls: The Use of Arabic and Pseudo-Arabic Inscription in the Synagogue of El Transito." She also received a BA in English from Texas A&M University and an MAT from Simmons College. Elisa's interests include the ritual context of medieval sculpture, interdisciplinary methodology, and cross-cultural contacts in the medieval Mediterranean. She is currently working on her dissertation entitled, "Imaging and Imagining Notre Dame du Puy: The Afterlife of a Medieval Virgin in Majesty Statue.”
Contact: Elisa_Foster@Brown.edu |
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| Emily Handlin |
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Mazie McKenna Harris
History of Photography, Ph.D. candidate
M.A. Boston University
B.A. Trinity University
Harris’ work considers the politics of representation in modern American prints and photographs. After completing a M.A. thesis on Ben Shahn’s photographs of Southeast Asia, she worked for several years in the Prints, Drawings, and Photographs departments of the Fogg Art Museum. Recent projects include an examination of Civil War chromolithographic caricatures, a study of retouching in commercial portrait studio photography, and research into late nineteenth-century narrative stereographs.
Contact: Mazie_Harris@brown.edu |
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Divya Rao Heffley
Divya received her B.A. in the History of Art from Yale University in 2001. She worked at Weiss/Manfredi Architects in New York City and the Heinz Architectural Center of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh before entering Brown in 2004 with research interests in contemporary architecture and urbanism. Divya received her Master’s degree in 2006 with a thesis entitled “Re-visioning the Urban Landscape: Spatial Perception and Sequential Vision in 1960s Urban Theory.” For her doctoral dissertation, she is examining the historical context and emergence of several architectural space time notations created in America during the 1960s to describe the complex visual experience of moving through urban space. She is particularly interested in how these systems of notation seem to have engaged in two central discourses concerned with the creation of a clear and contextually sensitive urban landscape: one on urban redevelopment and the meaning of place; another on psychology and new ways of seeing. In 2008–2009, Divya’s research is funded through the Carter Manny Award of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Contact: Divya_Heffley@brown.edu |
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Alanna Hildt
Contact: Alanna_Hildt@Brown.edu |
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I-Fen Huang
I-Fen Huang received her MA from National Taiwan University (2002), specializing in Chinese painting and textile. In 2001 she co-organized an exhibition for a private collection in Taiwan and co-authored the catalogue Enchanting Images: Late Chinese Painting and Calligraphy from the Shih-t'ou Shu-wu Collection. She started her study in US at New York University and worked as a graduate intern at the International Center of Photography in New York (2003-2004) before coming to Brown. Since joining the program here, she has continued her work on pictorial textile of late imperial China. Part of her research is presented at the Tenth Biennial Symposium of Textile Society of America (2006): “Wife’s Works, Husband’s Words: An Album of Gu Family Embroidery from Late Imperial China.” Focusing on the Gu family style embroidery made in seventeenth-century Shanghai and other regions in southeast China in the succeeding two centuries, her dissertation will explore issues such as the commodification of literati culture, and interrelationship between needlecraft and gender in late imperial China.
Contact: I-Fen_Huang@Brown.edu |
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Wei Jiang
Contact: Wei_Jiang@Brown.edu |
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Melissa R. Katz
PhD candidate, specializing in medieval Spain; MA, Brown University (art history); MS, University of Delaware (art conservation); BA, Williams College (English). Melissa’s research interests include the devotional art of the later Middle Ages and lay reception of doctrine, with a focus on cult images as evidence of social dynamics, cultural identity, and religious belief. She has taught classes at RISD (lecture) and Brown (seminar), and collaborated with professors at Wellesley College and Brandeis University. Melissa has published articles in Gesta, Res, Interfaces, and the Leids Kunsthistorische Jaarboek, and a catalogue with Oxford University Press. Additional essays will appear in edited volumes on medieval art and history forthcoming from Brill and Princeton. Her dissertation is entitled “Interior Motives: the Vierge ouvrante/Triptych Virgin in medieval and early modern Iberia.”
Contact: Melissa_Katz@Brown.edu
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Alice Klima
Alice began her undergraduate work at the University of Minnesota and finished her B.A. at Lake Forest College in Illinois. She obtained an MA in Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee before deciding on a career in Art History. She continued studies at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in Art History and received her MA in Art History before beginning the Ph.D. program in the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. Currently she is working on her dissertation titled, “The Last Bishop of Prague and the Foundation of the Monastery of Augustinian Canons at Roudnice on the Elbe, Bohemia.” Her interests include Central European Medieval architecture, monastic culture, the transmission of style and architecture in medieval Europe. As a Czech native, she is most interested in medieval Bohemia and issues of nationality and identity in medieval culture.
Contact: Alice_Klima@Brown.edu |
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Amanda Lahikainen
Amanda graduated with a B.A. in philosophy from Wellesley College (2002) and holds an A.M. in art history from Brown University (2007). Her dissertation, "Unchecked Ideas: Humor and the French Revolution in Late Eighteenth-Century British Political Graphic Satire," explores how satirists (mainly Isaac Cruikshank, James Gillray, James Sayers and Thomas Rowlandson) represented a number of charged political loci in their satirical art production, specifically the continual threat of a French invasion, political hegemony over Ireland, the idea of public credit, and the fear of religious dissention and republican radicalism at home. Questioning the conditions of possibility for art that can invite a variety of shifting responses from laughter to shock within a single frame, her project seeks to understand how stereotypes from the revolutionary milieu were used to express British domestic politics. Her research is currently funded by the Huntington Library and Art Collections in San Marino (CA), Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington (CT), and the Library of Congress in Washington. Amanda's research interests include: Eighteenth-century British Art; Graphic Satire & Print Culture; Aesthetics; World Monuments; Modern & Contemporary Architecture; the Pre-Raphaelites; and Theories and Methods of Art History.
Contact: Amanda_Lahikainen@Brown.edu |
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Ruth Lo
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Anne Mitzen
Contact: msmitzen@aol.com |
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Sarah Moran
Sarah Moran, PhD candidate, Northern Renaissance Art & Architecture
Hails from: Northeast Tennessee
BA: Amherst College; Fine Arts and English
MA: Brown University, History of Art & Architecture
Dissertation: The Visual Culture of Flemish Beguinages, 1585-1700
Interests: European Art & Architecture from 1400-1700; religion and politics; the Counter-Reformation; images and devotional practice; monasticism; beguines; gender; social history; urbanism; print culture.
Current position: Assistant, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Bern
Contact: Sarah_Moran@Brown.edu |
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Emily Chace Morash
Status: Fourth Year
Emily received her B.A. from Smith College in Art History and Italian Language and Literature (2004), where she spent a year studying in Florence, Italy. Emily then received her M.A. from the University of Virginia in Architectural History (2006). Her M.A. Thesis is titled, “The Città Universitaria and Cultivating a National Identity: Fascist-sponsored Urban Projects and Architecture in Rome.” She presented a version of this project as a paper at the Annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians (2007) titled, “The National and the International at the Città Universitaria: Developing Identity through Architecture.” Emily has worked at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and is the former president of the Thomas Jefferson Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians. In Spring 2008, Emily taught “350 Years of American Architecture” in the Historic Preservation Program for RISD’s Continuing Education Department. Her interests include the use of 3D digital models in architectural history and the use of web-page presentation tools for academic projects. Emily’s dissertation, currently titled, The Future Image of Living: Italian Domestic Architecture, 1941-1946, examines how Italian architectural practice and popular media including film developed a new image of domestic living for the future.
Contact: Emily_Morash@Brown.edu
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Kristen Oehlrich
Contact: Kristen_Oehlrich@brown.edu |
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Mario Pereira
After receiving degrees from Oberlin College (BA, art history) and the University of Chicago (MA, art history), Mario worked on the editorial staff of the New York Review of Books. He then joined the curatorial staff at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum before coming to Brown in 2004. He is interested in the visual and material culture of European courts during the Renaissance and Early Modern periods as well as the literature of art.
Contact: Mario_Pereira@Brown.edu
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Kathy Quick
Interest: Photography
Contact: Kathy_Quick@Brown.edu |
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Brian Repetto
Contact: Brian_Repetto@Brown.edu
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Erin Sassin
Status: Sixth year (Fall 2009)
Erin received her B.A. from the University of Michigan with a dual concentration in German and the History of Art (2000). She completed her M.A. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2004) concentrating on both Modern Architecture and Northern and Italian Renaissance Art History.
Her advisor at Brown is Dietrich Neumann, and she is particularly interested in how architecture intersected with the politics of reform and negotiated class tensions between 1850-1933 in Central Europe. Her dissertation, enabled by a Humboldt University (Berlin) Fellowship, examines the architectural form, social importance and urban relationships of the Ledigenheim, a housing type for unmarried people in Germany that flourished from about 1890 until 1933. This dissertation topic encompasses one of the broader themes of architectural modernism, the conflict between the individual and the collective.
While at Brown, Erin has worked as a proctor at the RISD Museum and as a teaching assistant. She is a participant in the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning certificate programs and planned (with two colleagues) a successful Graduate Student Symposium in Architecture and Urbanism in 2007, entitled Urban Transformations / Shifting Identities. She is also involved with a project on the work of Ira Rakatansky, a Providence architect and former student of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.
Contact: Erin_Sassin@Brown.edu |
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Suzanne Scanlan
Suzanne Scanlan received her B.A. in Humanities from Stonehill College. She entered the graduate program in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown in 2004 and received her M.A. in 2006, with a qualifying paper entitled Massacre, Madonna and Medici: Images of Salvation and Reform in Poccetti’s Innocenti Refectory. She is currently working on her dissertation project on the visual culture of women’s religious communities in early modern Rome.
Contact: Suzanne_Scanlan@Brown.edu
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Joseph Silva
Ph.D. candidate, Brown University
M.A., Syracuse University, Florence, Italy
B.A., Wheaton College, Norton, MA
I study the visual and material culture of Renaissance Italy with a specific focus on ducal Tuscany. My dissertation explores the artistic programs associated with the Naval Knighthood of Saint Stephen in Pisa and Florence.
Contact: Joseph_Silva@Brown.edu |
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Nathaniel Stein
Ph.D. candidate, Brown University
M.A., History of Art and Architecture, Brown University, 2005 B.A., History of Art, Wesleyan University, 1999 Nathaniel specializes in 19th-century British visual culture. His dissertation deals with the representation of British masculinity and embodiment in the context of colonial encounter, with chapters addressing painting and the Crimean War, prints and the Indian Uprising, and the photographs of Robert Gill, a British colonial in India. Nathaniel has recently held a graduate fellowship at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women and a junior fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London. He was a participant in the Visual Cultures of British India research seminar at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, in June 2009. Since 2008, he has been an adjunct faculty member at the Rhode Island School of Design, teaching courses in the history and theory of photography and film. Nathaniel holds a Teaching Certificate from the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning and has been the HAA department's nominee for Brown's Presidential Teaching Award.
Contact: Nathaniel_Stein@Brown.edu |
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Chelsea Tarvin
I graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 2007 with a double major in Art History and Ancient Studies. While at Mount Holyoke, I worked in the college’s art museum as a receptionist and intern. I spent a semester in Athens, Greece where I studied ancient architecture and Greek athletics. After graduation, I married my handsome husband and moved with him to Washington where I interned with Museum of Glass’s education department, writing curricula for school tours. I also worked as a museum educator with the Tacoma Art Museum’s Art After School program which introduces at-risk kids to the fine arts. At Brown, I intend to study ancient domestic architecture and its interplay with landscape. I am also interested in ancient archaeology and museum studies.
Lisa Tom
Lisa's diverse interests led her to double major in Art History and Art Media (Computing) and minor in Asian Studies at UCSD (2001). Her commitment to the History of Art prevailed, and in 2005, she received her M.A. from UCLA with an emphasis on the Italian Renaissance and minors in Classical and Japanese arts. While at UCLA, she has had the pleasure of contributing to the online image database of the Monastic Matrix and serving on the editorial board of Comitatus. Soon after, she catapulted to the East Coast to continue her studies at Brown University. Her interests include early modern issues of gender, nationality, court cultures, and discourses on art. For the moment, her dissertation focuses on portraiture, masculinities, and military history in early modern Italy.
Contact: Lisa_Tom@Brown.edu
Veronica Totos
Vera received a B.A. from Colgate University in a double major of Art and Asian Studies. At Colgate she held a three-year long internship at Picker Art Gallery, where she assisted with graphic design of exhibitions and publications. She also holds an M.A. in Art History from Williams College, where she focused on modern and contemporary art and wrote her qualifying paper on Hungarian cinema, titled "Camera Choreography and Empathy in Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies." She held a curatorial internship at the Williams College Museum of Art, helping with bringing the traveling exhibition"Edward Steichen: In High Fashion the Condé Nast Years, 1923–1937" to
Williamstown, and to curate the WCMA’s own, simultaneous take on Steichen's
photography, "Edward Steichen: Episodes from a Life in Photography." Vera entered Brown University’s graduate program in 2009, where she plans to study in 20th century film. |
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Jennifer Wagner
Jennifer Marie Wagner has a B.A. in Growth and Structure of Cities from Bryn Mawr College (2007) and an M.A. in the History of Art and Architecture from Brown University (2009). Her fields of concentration are modern and contemporary American architectural history. Her master’s thesis, “The Language of Style: Defining American Art Deco Architecture,” analyzes the content and tone of 1920s and 1930s period dialogue about style in conjunction with the findings of contemporary scholarship with the goal of rethinking and redefining the current categories into which the architecture of this era is placed with the intention of creating a more precise linguistic framework with which to make observations and to draw conclusions about the significance of Art Deco. Jennifer is currently writing her dissertation about American suburban commercial architecture of the 1970s and 1980s, specifically the showrooms that the architecture and environmental arts organization SITE designed for Best Products Company.
Contact:Jennifer_Wagner@brown.edu
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Nathaniel Walker
Contact: Nathaniel_Walker@brown.edu
After growing up in the Philippines and Arkansas, among other places, Nathaniel graduated with a BA in History from Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. He earned his MA in Architectural History from the Savannah College of Art & Design, where his Master's Thesis, entitled "Savannah's Lost Squares," won the Outstanding Graduate Thesis Document Award. After working for two years in Mitchell/ Matthews Architects & Planners in Charlottesville, Virginia, as a draftsman, researcher, and occasional designer, Nathaniel entered Brown University's Ph.D. program in the Fall of 2008 in order to work with Professor Dietrich Neumann on questions pertaining to the relationships between turn-of-the-century theories of scientific Utopian "progress" and Modernist architecture and urban planning. In addition to Modernist theory, Nathaniel is heavily drawn to discourse surrounding Zeitgeist temporal determinism, Picturesque Romanticism and projection theory, the struggle to achieve a human scale in today's vitriolic design world, the often blurry lines between public and private space, Mayan urbanism, Ethiopian churches, Scottish ales, and people who can play the drums.
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Fan Zhang
Fan Zhang completed his B.A. at Jilin University, China, with a concentration in Archaeology (2001), and received his MA in the History of Art from Vanderbilt University (2003). He then worked in the Asian Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before coming to Brown. He is interested in art and archaeology of 11th-13th century China and material culture of “Conquest Dynasties”. He is currently writing his dissertation on the visual culture of Jin and Yuan dynasty Shanxi with a focus on the interactions among art, ritual, and theatre. In 2008–2009, Fan’s research is funded through the American Council of Learned Societies and the Henry Luce Foundation.
Contact: Fan_Zhang@Brown.edu |
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