Joseph Semkiu

Joe is a third-year PhD student in Art History and enrolled in the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. He specializes in American art from the colonial era to 1950, with a focus on American modernism from the first half of the twentieth century. His interests include how images circulate, mass media and commercial images, the aural, and issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Joe is considering a dissertation topic around the intersection between American art of the 1940s and radio, examining the relationship between the aural and the visual. He is also interested in American magic realism, particularly the work of John Atherton, O. Louis Guglielmi, Jared French, and Audrey Buller. Prior to his arrival at USC, Joe earned his BA in Art History and Italian from Northwestern University and his MA in Art History from Tufts University. He also worked at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 2018, Joe was awarded the Robert C. Vose and Ann Peterson Vose Scholarship for the Study of American Art History.

[semkiu@usc.edu]

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