Joseph Semkiu

Joe Semkiu is a Provost Fellow and PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California, focusing on US art and visual culture. He is a recipient of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate.For the 2025-26 academic year, Joe will be a Big Ten Academic Alliance Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He will also be a Swann Foundation Fellow at the Library of Congress in Summer 2026.

His dissertation, “Art of the Airwaves: American Painting, Circulation, and Radio in the 1940s,” examines how artists imagined and sold radio and how radio permeated American (visual) culture in the years around the Second World War. The project explores a wide swath of cultural evidence as primary sources––paintings, radio programs, drawings, periodicals, advertisements, literature, films, music, and design––to unpack his case studies: the art of Norman Rockwell, Doris Lee, Jacob Lawrence, Paul Cadmus, and the CBS radio program, Suspense. Broadly, his research considers how US artists during World War II responded artistically on the home front, and abroad, to the cultural, material, and emotional wartime changes. These projects examine how art exemplified the global war as “for the duration,” while yearning for homecoming.

In summer 2025, Joe was a Platzman Memorial Fellow at the University of Chicago. This spring, he was a John Furr Fellow at the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History at the Rubenstein Library at Duke University and a John H. Daniels Fellow at the National Sporting Library and Museum.

Joe earned his B.A. in art history and Italian from Northwestern University and his M.A. in art history from Tufts University. His research has been supported by the University of Southern California Department of Art History, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, the Decorative Arts Trust, the Design History Society, and the Forest History Society, among others. In 2018, Joe was the recipient of the Robert C. Vose and Ann Peterson Vose Scholarship in American Art History. Prior to coming to USC, Joe worked at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Art Institute of Chicago.

[semkiu@usc.edu]

• BA Northwestern University, 6/2014
• MA Tufts University