Current Graduate Students

If you would like to contact one of the graduate students in the department, please send an email to arthist@usc.edu and your message will be forwarded to the appropriate individual. Students who have attained "All But Dissertation" status are designated as ABD.

Samuel Adams
	This is Sam's second year as a Provost Fellow in the Art History program at USC. He completed his B.A. at New York University, graduating summa cum laude. There he developed a concentration in postwar German art. In Los Angeles he has continued along that line of research by focusing in on legacies of Modernism, Romanticism and aesthetic theory as artists have taken them up in divided Germany through to the present. This past summer he studied at the Goethe-Institut Berlin.
Cathrine Besancon
	Cathrine Besancon advanced to doctoral candidacy in summer of 2008. Her research focuses on twelfth-century Romanesque sculpture in southern France. As a Chateaubriand fellow (2009-2010), Cathrine conducted research in France on her dissertation, “The French Romanesque Portals of Moissac, Souillac and Beaulieu: A Response to the Papal Reform Movement and Popular Heresy,” which explores the response in monumental sculpture to the challenges posed to Church authority both from within, the papal reform movement, and from without, the rise for popular heresy. Cathrine presented papers related to her dissertation at the International Medieval Society’s (Paris) April meeting in 2010, the International Medieval Congress, Leeds in the summer of 2009 and at the Visualizing Religion Seminar, an interdisciplinary meeting of faculty and graduate students at USC in the spring of 2008. For the summer of 2009, Cathrine was awarded the International Field Research Award from USC to conducted dissertation research in France. Cathrine has also received the Getty Memorial Scholarship (Summer 2007), USC Provost Fellowship (2005 - 2007) and the Phi Beta Kappa Graduate Study Award (2005). Cathrine was also awarded the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences General Education Graduate Assistant Award (2008-2009) in recognition of outstanding teaching in the General Education Program. She received her M.A. in Art History from USC in 2007 and her B.A. from UCLA in 2005, where she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.
Nicholas Cipolla
	Nick entered the program with a B.A. in Art History and Classical Civilization (with distinctions in both majors) from Yale University and received his M.Phil. in Classics at the University of Cambridge. His current work is focused in the realm of Classical Art, primarily the art of Rome. He has worked extensively on imperial portraiture, the Roman Art Market, and on the concept of the child in Roman Art. Other interests include the use of technology in the study of archaeology, and he has presented and published papers at several conferences, including the Archaeological Institute of America Conference, Stanford University, and the University of London. Nick has also been a research assistant at the Getty Research Institute. He has recently passed his qualifying exams and is working on his dissertation tentatively titled "The Visual Imagery of Infancy and Pre-Adolescence in Roman Italy and the West" while on a Provost's Fellowship.
Ellen Dooley
	Ellen advanced to doctoral candidacy in August 2011. She is in her fourth year in the Ph.D. program after graduating from Trinity University with a B.A. in Art History and Religion (comparative). Ellen specializes in seventeenth-century Spanish painting and her dissertation, "Remedying the Decline: Art Patronage in Golden Age Seville," will focus on art commissioned for the decoration of hospitals in Seville. Thanks to grants from the Del Amo Foundation, she spent the summer of 2009 and the spring of 2011 in Madrid and Seville, investigating religious art housed in various healing spaces. Ellen has assisted with a study day exploring Golden Age Seville hosted by the J. Paul Getty Museum and worked as a research assistant for the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. Ellen has presented her work at the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies' annual conference and at California State University, Los Angeles. Grants from the Del Amo Foundation, the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States' Universities, and the Interdisciplinary Research Group of the Center for Religious and Civic Culture will support her dissertation research in Spain this coming spring.
Sarah Goodrum
	Sarah Goodrum advanced to PhD candidacy in October 2010. She is a Provost Fellow specializing in Twentieth-Century Central European Art and the History of Photography and Photojournalism. She has been Research Assistant to the Head of the Scholars Program at the Getty Research Institute (2009-2010) and Editorial Assistant for The Art Bulletin, edited by Professor Karen Lang (2010-2011). She has received grants for language study and research from DAAD, USC College, and the Conference Group for Central European History. Paper presentations include “The Photo-Editor as Autocrat: The Management of Space and Persona in the Work of Stefan Lorant” at the USC Graduate Student symposium in 2008 and “Photographic Education as Public ‘Re-Education’: The Building of Socialist Society at the Leipzig Hochschule for Graphic and Book Arts” at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the History of Education Society. Sarah is currently conducting research for her dissertation, entitled "East German Photography: Artwork and Political Tool." In 2011-2012 she will be in Berlin conducting archival research on a Borchard Foundation Fellowship. Before coming to USC, she graduated from Vassar College with a BA in English, and enjoyed an editorial career in trade and academic publishing before pursuing her MA in Art History at Vanderbilt University.
Katherine Kerrigan
	Katie advanced to doctoral candidacy in September 2010. Her research focuses on postwar American art and visual culture. Her dissertation, tentatively titled Cataloguing Critique: Experimental Forms of Documentation in American Art, 1970-1977, concerns catalogs and other art publications that served as critiques, alternative curatorial processes, and stand alone exhibitions. Other scholarly interests include graphic design and avant-garde film. Katie is a College Doctoral Fellow and since 2008 has been Graduate Assistant for The Contemporary Project, directed by Professor Richard Meyer. She completed the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate (VSGC) program in 2010 and was Graduate Assistant for VSGC for the 2010-2011 academic year. She served as co-chair for USC Art History Department’s 13th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Peripheral Visions: Colonization, Resistance, Representation, in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, and has presented lectures at multiple symposia, including the 2010 symposium and film festival, Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in LA 1945 - 1980, and her department’s own Art History Graduate Student Symposium in 2010. Katie completed her undergraduate work at Washington & Lee University with a B.A. in Art History and and a B.S. in Business Administration, and she received her M.A. in Art History from Vanderbilt University.
Anca Lasc
	Anca Lasc studies nineteenth-century European art and design history. Advanced to Ph.D. candidacy in 2007, Anca is completing her dissertation, “Designing Space: The French Private Interior Illustrated, 1852-1914.” In the fall of 2010 she will be the predoctoral fellow in residence at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York, while in the spring of 2011 she will continue her research at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. Anca recently presented fragments from her dissertation at the annual conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and at the historical session of the annual conference organized by the Interior Design Educators Council and the Modern Interiors Research Center. This fall, she will speak at the joint symposium of Southeastern College Art Association and the Mid-America College Art Association. In 2008, she received the USC Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.
Megan Mastroianni
	Megan is in her third year in the PhD program. In 2006, she received her BA in Art History from USC. She spent the following three years working in the Modern Art Department at LACMA, where she contributed to such projects as the 2008 reinstallation of the museum's collection of Modern Art and the 2009-10 exhibition "Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures." Megan studies Modern and Contemporary German Art and is developing a dissertation topic around the Cologne-based artists' magazine "Interfunktionen." In past summers, she has studied German at the Goethe Institute in Berlin and conducted archival research in Cologne. She is a College Doctoral Fellow.
Elizabeth Murphy
	Elizabeth received her B.A. in Art History from Bard College in 2005. Her primary interest is in Contemporary Native American and Chicano art, with a focus on cross-cultural representations and appropriation. She has worked on traditional New Mexican "folkart", lowrider art, and other non-art art practices. Before starting at USC she was the co-founder and director of an alternative, collective art space (A.D. Collective) in Santa Fe, NM.
Younjung Oh
	Younjung is in her third year of the Ph.D. program. She received her B.A. in art history from Seoul National University and worked for an art magazine in Seoul. Her primary area of interest is in modern and contemporary art and visual culture of East Asia. Her dissertation project will examine urban visual culture in Japan during the early 20th century. The subject of department store as the important medium for visualization of Japanese modernization will be her main topic. In 2005, Younjung was awarded an ACE Japanese studies fellowship from East Asian Studies Center at USC. She spent the summer of 2006 in Tokyo, doing research with the assistance of an Inamoto Fellowship, USC East Asian Languages and Cultures.
Jennifer Reynolds
	Jennifer Leigh Reynolds is a PhD Candidate in the Art History Department at the University of Southern California, where she earned her Master’s degree in Art History in 2009. Her dissertation focuses on contemporary Mexican artists who reinterpret Pre-Columbian visual culture in their work. Her research interests span from late nineteenth-century Mexican casts in U.S. museums to the impact of collecting practices on indigenous communities. She has participated in summer programs in both archaeology and anthropology, and has worked in various museums in San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C. In addition, she is a Research Assistant for Kaya Press, a non-profit independent publisher for books that address the Asian Diaspora.
Virginia Solomon
	Virginia Solomon advanced to Ph.D. candidacy in December of 2009. She specializes in modern and contemporary art, culture, and politics. Her dissertation, tentatively titled 'Queer Outsider Methods: General Idea's Art and Politics, 1969-1994,' considers the work of Canadian artist group General Idea. She places the group's practice in the context of an expanded and evolving conversation concerning the relationship between art and politics, and argues that its incorporation of sexuality enabled it to reconfigure what constituted both political and artistic activity. Other interests include feminist theory, cultural studies, and visual studies. Solomon was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program for the 2007/2008 academic year. She was a 2009/2010 Canadian Art Research Fellow at the National Gallery of Canada, and is the 2010/2011 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. She graduated from Stanford University in 2004 with a B.A. in studio art and feminist studies.
Ambra Spinelli
	Ambra Spinelli is in her first year as a Ph.D. student in Art History at USC. Her research focuses on ancient Roman Art and Architecture and the display of art in the private sphere. In 2005, she received her BA in Classics from the Università di Bologna. Ambra has participated in several archaeological excavations and research projects involving Etruscan, Roman, and Medieval sites in Italy, such as Marzabotto, Bologna, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Acquaviva Picena, and Albinia. She attended SOMA 2007: XI International Symposium on Mediterranean Archaeology in Istanbul, with a published paper titled: "Underwater Archaeology in Italy: the Park of Baia (Naples)." Particularly noteworthy was her M.A. thesis in Archaeology in 2008 concerning the preparation of a Museum of Antiquities inside the Department of Archaeology, Università di Bologna. Ambra served as Antiquities Graduate Intern in 2009-2010 at the J. Paul Getty Villa, Los Angeles and she is currently working as Assistant to the Director in the "PARP:PS - Pompeii Archaeological Research Project: Porta Stabia," led by the University of Cincinnati.
Erin Sullivan
	Erin advanced to candidacy in December 2009. During the 2010 - 2011 academic year, she will be in Munich and Berlin Germany researching her dissertation, "Making and Marketing the Print Portfolio in Interwar Germany: Max Beckmann, George Grosz, and Otto Dix" with the help of a Borchard Overseas Dissertation Fellowship. In 2010, she was the Art Bulletin Editorial Assistant for incoming Editor-in-Chief, Karen Lang. She has been Research Assistant to a number of Scholars-in-Residence at the Getty Research Institute, and has worked on several projects in the Getty's Provenance Index including an ongoing project to expand online material related to Nazi-era provenance research. She has worked at museums including the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, the Department of Prints Drawings and Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and at the Cunningham Center for Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Smith College Museum of Art. Erin received her M.A. in Art History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2006.
Kristine Tanton
	Kristine advanced to doctoral candidacy in August 2008. Her research focuses on Romanesque sculpture and its placement within architectural space. She is currently working on her dissertation, “The Marking of Monastic Space: Inscribed Language on Romanesque Capitals,” which investigates the prevalence of inscriptions on historiated capitals in monastic churches along the pilgrimage route in France during the twelfth century. She will spend the Spring 2009 semester in France conducting field and archive research with the help of a USC McClelland Fellowship. She served as a session chair at the CMRS Ahmanson Conference, “The Foundations of Medieval Monasticism” held at UCLA in January 2008. In the summer of 2007 she delivered a paper on the inscribed cloister capitals at Moissac at a joint seminar of UCLA, Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, and the Institut für Mittelalterforschung held at the University of Vienna. She served as co-chair for the 2007 USC Graduate Student Symposium, “A Useful Thing? Shifting Values, Uses and Interpretations of Art.” She also presented a paper on the pavement labyrinth of Amiens Cathedral at the 2006 USC Graduate Student Symposium. Kristine received her BFA from Parsons School of Design and worked as an art director in publishing and multimedia before arriving at USC. She received her M.A. in art history from USC in May 2007.

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