| Samuel Adams |
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Samuel advanced to PhD candidacy in August 2012. He works with Professor Megan Luke on German modernism and has written and spoken on topics including performance and installation art, photography, music, and aesthetics. After graduating summa cum laude from New York University he gained professional experience at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Getty Research Institute. Samuel has delivered papers at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the International Bauhaus Colloquium in Weimar, the Association of Art Historians, and the German Studies Association. He recently contributed a chapter on Wagnerian set design for the volume Representations of German Identity (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013) and published a review of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibition Gustav Klimt: The Magic of Line on caa.reviews. His dissertation is a study of how art became theatrical in post-WWII Germany and is tentatively titled “The Art of Staging: Set Design in Divided Germany, 1968-1989.” His research is funded by a grant from the German Academic Exchange Program (DAAD), a fellowship from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and USC’s Provost PhD Fellowship. Last year he was awarded the USC Dornsife general education graduate assistant teaching award. This summer Samuel will participate in the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University. He keeps up his violin and viola playing with a string quartet and a bluegrass band in case his plans to be an art historian do not pan out. |
| Nadya Bair |
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Nadya is in her third year as Provost Fellow in the Art History department, where she works on the history of photography and photojournalism. Her dissertation, tentatively titled "Bringing Home the World Picture: Global Photojournalism and Postwar America," examines how the world was photographed in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Nadya's interests include the history of the photo book, artist and photographer networks in Europe and the United States, photo agencies, art pracites during wartime, and the connection between Jews and photography. Research grants from USC's Visual Studies Research Institute and the Science, Technology, and Society Research Cluster have supported Nadya's research at the International Center for Photography, the Ransom Center, the Center for Creative Photography, the Magnum Foundation, and the UNESCO archives. In 2011, she worked on the exhibit "Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust," which opened at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York in the fall of 2012. Nadya graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard College in 2006, and received her MA in Art History from USC in 2012.
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| Cathrine Besancon |
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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. |
| Ellen Dooley |
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This is Ellen's fifth year in the Ph.D. program after graduating from Trinity University with a B.A. in Art History and Religion. She received her MA from USC in 2010, and she advanced to canidacy in 2011. Ellen works with Dr. Sean Roberts, and she specializes in seventeenth-century Spanish painting and print. Her dissertation, "Painting Salvation: Affluence, Art, and Plague in Golden Age Seville," focuses on the relationships between the city's elite patrons and its community of artists. The project evaluates the impacts of the 1649 plague, the circulation of art historical writing, and the social climate of Tridentine Spain on the roles of artists and the status of the objects they produced. Other scholarly interests include Colonial Latin American art, trans-Atlantic exchanges, and the history of the Catholic Church. She has written and presented her work on art patronage, festival books, and architecture at California State University, Los Angeles, the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies' annual conferences in Ottawa and Boston, and the New College Medieval-Renaissance Conference. She has received funding from the Del Amo Foundation, the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States' Universities, the Interdisciplinary Research Group of the Center for Religious and Civic Culture, and the USC-Huntington EMSI. A Borchard Foundation Fellowship is currently supporting her archival research in Seville.
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| Sarah Goodrum |
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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. Recent paper presentations include “Photographic Education as Public ‘Re-Education’: The Building of Socialist Society at the Leipzig Hochschule for Graphic and Book Arts” at the Annual Meeting of the History of Education Society (2011) and "Menschenfamilien and the Documentary Tradition: The Dual Influence of 'The Family of Man' in the GDR" at the 4. Tagung des Arbeitskreises Kunst in Der DDR, Berlin, Germany (2012). Sarah is currently conducting research for her dissertation, entitled "The Problem of the Missing Museum: Adventures and Misadventures in the Exhibition of Photographs in the GDR." In 2012-2013, she is based in Berlin, Germany with a Fulbright Research Grant. 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 |
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Katie is a Ph.D. Candidate and current recipient of a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Graduate School. Her research focuses on postwar American art and visual culture, and she plans to complete her dissertation in the summer of 2013. Her dissertation, "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. Her other scholarly interests include European modernism, graphic design and avant-garde film. Katie has served as co-chair for USC’s graduate symposium and has presented lectures at conferences in the fields of art history and avant-garde film. She also worked as an exhibition researcher and catalog contributor for Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 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.
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| Megan Mastroianni |
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Megan advanced to doctoral candidacy in August 2012. A College Doctoral Fellow, she is in her fourth year in the PhD program and is currently conducting research for her dissertation, tentatively titled “The Spaces in Between: the Artists’ Magazine and its Reader in West Germany.” Taking the West German periodical Interfunktionen (1968-1975) as case study, Megan explores the ways in which the artists’ magazine functioned to alert its reader to his or her own important role as maker of meaning, mapping the political significance of such an act in postwar West Germany. Megan has been the recipient of language study, travel and research grants from DAAD and USC’s Dornsife. She co-organized the 2012 symposium, “Art and the Mind: Neuroaesthetics, Phenomenology and the Experience of Vision," and presented her paper, "Documenta: Spectacle and Post-War Identity in West Germany," at the annual conference of the German Studies Association in 2012. Prior to joining the PhD program at USC, Megan worked 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." Her work appears in the recent LACMA publication, Envisioning Modernism: The Janice and Henri Lazarof Collection (2012). Megan received her BA in Art History from USC in 2006. |
| Brendan Mc Mahon |
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Brendan is a third year provost fellow studying the visual and material culture of colonial Latin America under the direction of Dr. Daniela Bleichmar. His dissertation will reexamine the interaction of Europe and the Spanish Americas during the early Viceregal Period (1521-1700) through the lens of color. It focuses on the movement of natural and artificial objects across the Atlantic in order to investigate the construction of color geographies, the reception of wondrous optical effects such as iridescence and fluorescence, and the relationship between materiality and color. General interests include the history of collecting and display, the connections between empiricism, naturalism, art and science, and the evolution and transmission of indigenous American knowledge in the early modern period. Awards from the Del Amo Foundation and the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate have funded archival research in Mexico City and Puebla, in addition to participation in the Yale/IDIEZ Summer Nahuatl Institute. He holds a BA in Art History and Hispanic Studies from Vassar College (2007; general and departmental honors, Phi Beta Kappa) and an MA from USC (2012), as well as professional experience as a museum educator at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Brooklyn Museum. He is, lastly, an avid bird enthusiast. |
| Elizabeth Murphy |
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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.
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| Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye |
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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 |
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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.
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| Ambra Spinelli |
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Ambra Spinelli is in her second 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. |
| Mackenzie Stevens |
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MacKenzie is in her third year at USC. Her research focuses on American art and visual culture in the twentieth century. She is specifically interested in the intersections between art, politics, and museums in the 1930 and 1940s. MacKenzie’s dissertation will examine the ways in which paintings by combat artists during World War II illuminate broader social and cultural issues in the United States. In 2007, MacKenzie received her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, graduating with a mark of Distinction. At the Courtauld, she was a Fellow in the Institute’s Research Forum and the Sir Robert Witt Library. From 2007 – 2010, MacKenzie was the Assistant Archivist at the Museum of Modern Art and organized archival collections pertaining to James Lee Byars, Robert Motherwell, and Fluxus. MacKenzie has contributed research to several exhibitions and catalogues, including “Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles” (MoCA), “50 Years at Pace” (The Pace Gallery), and “The Museum and the War Effort: Artistic Freedom and Reporting for ‘The Cause’” (MoMA). In spring 2013, MacKenzie will deliver her first paper at CAA entitled “The Murals in the Wilshire Boulevard Temple: Picturing Jewish History for 1920s Hollywood.” |
| Erin Sullivan |
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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. |
| Lida Sunderland |
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This is Lida's third year as a College Doctoral Fellow at USC. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary American art and visual culture, with particular attention given to institutions, exhibition histories, questions of regionalism, and alternate histories of modernism. Her dissertation project will examine the persistence of painting in the post-studio environment of 1960s and 70s Los Angeles, when conceptual approaches to art and pedagogy reigned supreme. Lida graduated from New York University in 2007 with a BA in art history and journalism. She has professional and research experience in curatorial departments at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithisonian Institution; and most recently the Santa Monica Museum of Art for which she contributed to the 2011 exhibition and catalogue, "Beatrice Wood: Career Woman - Drawings, Paintings, Vessels, and Objects." |
| Kristine Tanton |
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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. |
| Katharine Wells |
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Kay Wells advanced to candidacy in September 2011. She studies modern art and visual culture from the late-eighteenth century to today with a special interest in the intersections between aesthetic theory, decorative arts and design, and social discourse. Her dissertation, Modernism’s Other Tableau: Tapestry in the Twentieth Century reexamines dominant narratives of modernism by revealing the extent to which modernism’s canonical artists, critics, and curators in France and the US engaged with tapestry as both a medium and a concept. From 2011 to 2012, Wells joined the Textile Project at the Institut für Künstgeschichte at the University of Zurich as a recipient of a Swiss National Science Foundation research fellowship. Her research in Europe was also supported by the Harmon Rorison Fellowship from the Institut Français d’Amérique at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Wells is the author of “Serpentine Sideboards, Hogarth’s Analysis, and the Beautiful Self,” Eighteenth-Century Studies (Spring 2013); “Curating the Cultural Landscape: Chipstone House as Historical Property,” The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum (2009); “The ‘merely imitative mood’: British Japonisme and Imperial Mimesis,” (forthcoming); and “Rockefeller’s Guernica: The Reproduction and Authorship of a Modern Tapestry,” (forthcoming), and she is contributing to the catalogue for Decorum, an exhibition opening at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in October 2013. Wells co-organized a panel on “Tapestry and Reproduction” at the 2013 annual meeting of the College Art Association and has given guest lectures and presented numerous conference papers in Europe, the US, and Australia. In addition to holding multiple Teaching Assistantships at USC, Wells was selected as a research assistant at the Getty Research Institute for the landmark Pacific Standard Time project and has held internships at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and Sotheby’s in New York. Wells completed a MA in Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009 where she was the James Watrous/Chipstone Fellow in Material Culture. |
