Art History
Olivia Armandroff is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the department of Art History and a recipient of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. She focuses on twentieth-century American art and material culture, and her dissertation, titled “Volcanic Matter: Land Formation and Artistic Creation,” examines how Hawai‘i’s volcanoes have animated diverse artistic engagements with land and landscape from the islands’ pre-contact era to the present day. She argues that artists’ responses to these dynamic sites expand canonical definitions of landscape art and American art and evidence intersections between Indigenous lifeways and histories of science, tourism, and colonialism. She holds a B.A. in the History of Art and History from Yale University and an M.A. in American Material Culture from the Winterthur Program at the University of Delaware.
Dissertation: “Volcanic Matter: Land Formation and Artistic Creation”
Advisor: Amy Ogata, Art History
Research Interests: Periodicals and Printed Ephemera, Photography, Travel Narratives, and Display Practices
2022-2023 NEH/VSRI Seminar Graduate Fellow
English
Josh Beckelhimer is a doctoral student in the English Department, and a 2022-23 VSRI-NEH Images Out of Time Graduate Fellow. His work concerns filmic and literary depictions of wilderness and environmentalism with a particular interest in genre of speculative fiction. He holds a B.A. In English Literature and Communications and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Cincinnati.
Catherine Bedoya
Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
Art History
Rose Bishop is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California and an enrollee in the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. She received her master’s degree in Art History and Curatorial Studies from Hunter College in 2021 and her bachelors in Art History from Kenyon College in 2017. Bishop is also a 2022-25 National Endowment for the Humanities Graduate Fellow with the VSRI’s Images Out of Time seminar, an interdisciplinary workshop that considers how images travel through time, dropping in and out of linear histories and reshaping perception, institutions, and social practices along the way. Her dissertation, “Idol Makers, Picture Takers: The Photography of Pop Music, 1944-1994,” examines the rise of professional music photography in relation to the documentary practices of fans, “groupies,” and musicians themselves. Her article, “‘The Whole Show on One Photograph’: Gordon Anderson and the Making of a Star at Harlem’s Apollo Theater,” was published in the Spring 2023 issue of Transbordeur and represents the first in-depth exploration of the photographer’s prolific career as a concert documentarian. Prior to her academic career, she worked as an archivist at the Richard Avedon Foundation. Bishop was the Research Assistant for the Visual Studies Research Institute during the 2023-2024 school year.
Dissertation: “Idol Makers, Picture Takers: The Photography of Pop Music, 1944-1994”
Advisor: Vanessa R. Schwartz, Art History and History
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2027
Research Interests: Photography, Commercial Art, Pop Culture, Fan and Celebrity Studies
2022-2025 NEH/VSRI Seminar Graduate Fellow
Cinema and Media Studies
Trace Cabot is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. His dissertation, tentatively titled Repetition and Disfigurement: The Shape of the Real in Classical Film and Animation Theory, focuses on the resonances and affinities between classical film and animation theory and contemporary Lacanian thought, locating the Real within the realism of Siegfried Kracauer, Dziga Vertov, Tosaka Jun, and others. He has a longstanding interest in Japanese and South Korean film, which form the bulk of his case studies both within his dissertation and other research. He was the organizer for Kumoricon Anime and Manga Studies in 2017 and the Anime Expo Academic Symposium in 2018. He served as a Research Associate at the Institute for Communication Arts and Technology and instructor at Hallym University in Chuncheon, South Korea from 2015-2016.
Art History
Claire Carcara is a Provost Fellow and PhD student in the Department of Art History, as well as a participant in the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. She has previously held curatorial and research internships at the David & Alfred Smart Museum of Art (University of Chicago), where she worked on the exhibitions Monochrome Multitudes (2022) and Calling on the Past (2023). Prior to attending USC, Claire earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Boston University, where she graduated summa cum laude and with departmental honors (History of Art & Architecture).
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2029
Research Interests: Vernacular Modernism, Alternative Exhibition Spaces and Exhibition History, Institutional Critique, (Non-traditional) Materiality, and American History
2024-2025 NEH/VSRI Seminar Graduate Fellow
History
Advisor: Dr. Wolf Gruner
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2026
Research Interests: Art, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Modern Europe, and Resistance
Art History
Courtney Carter is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History and a recipient of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. She studies modern art and visual culture since the nineteenth century. Her research interests include photographic manipulation, intermedial experimentation, gendered labor, and the performativity of process. She is the 2024-25 Kenneth J. Botto Research Fellow at the Center for Creative Photography and was a 2022-23 Graduate Fellow in the NEH-funded Humanities Initiative “Images out of Time: Visual and Material Culture in a Digital Age.” Prior to joining USC, she completed fellowships at Yale-NUS College in Singapore and the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College, where she curated and contributed to several exhibitions. She has held internships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and is an alumnus of the Independent Curators International Curatorial Intensive. Courtney received her B.A. in English Literature from Haverford College.
Advisors: Megan Luke and Vanessa Schwartz
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2027
2022-2023 NEH/VSRI Seminar Graduate Fellow
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Caitlyn’s research interests lie in tracing the image of the queer woman and her body (both material and spectral) and the ways she has been constructed, reconstructed, and/or erased in contemporary South Korea film, with a specific focus on how underground and subterranean spatial/architectural constructions interact with these queer presences. She is also interested in pursuing co-productions between South Korea and Japan.
Advisor: Youngmin Choe
Research Interests: South Korean Cinema & Media, Gender and Queer Theory, Body (in)visibility, and Architecture and Space
Cinema and Media Studies
Corina Copp is a PhD Candidate and Annenberg Endowed Fellow whose dissertation theorizes a nomadic political consciousness for works across discipline and moving-image practice in relation to place, language, and process; and feminist, artist, and activist non-networks. She received her BA at Eugene Lang College in New York, and her MFA in Playwriting at Brooklyn College – CUNY. In 2021, she founded Rotations (rotations-la.net), an LA-based screening series focused on experimental nonfiction filmmaking, artist and political cinema, and their detours, by living, transnational feminist practitioners and their collaborators. She is the North American translator of My Mother Laughs, by Chantal Akerman (The Song Cave, 2019); and the author of The Green Ray (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015).
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2025
Research Interests: Experimental Historiography, Transnational Film Histories, Avant-garde Documentary; Militant Activity in Women’s Narrative Filmmaking; Socialist-feminist Video Collectives; Artist Writings and Poetics; Questions of Collective and Diasporic Identity in Film, Theater and Performance; Couple-collaboration; Script and Print Culture; Memory Studies
Hana Cordero Rothstein
History
Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, Comparative Media Track
Aidan Diamond is a doctoral candidate in comparative media with a background in comics studies. She has presented papers at conferences in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., and Europe, and published in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Studies in Comics, and the edited collections The Ascendance of Harley Quinn and Politics in Gotham, with a forthcoming article in the open access, peer-reviewed journal MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture. Her dissertation examines how climate-inflected apocalypse narratives are revising the apocalyptic tradition across novels, films, and comics.
Dissertation: “‘For A Better Future’: Narrative and Hope at the End of the World”
Advisor: Natania Meeker
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2025
Research Interests: Comics, Film, Pop Culture, Environmental Humanities, Apocalypse, and Surveillance
Eileen DiPofi
Cinema and Media Studies
Eileen DiPofi is a PhD student in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at USC. She studies performance in early American cinema, with a particular focus on how contemporary discourses of race, gender, and sexuality inform the emergent Hollywood style of naturalist film acting. Eileen holds a BA in Film, Television, and Theatre from the University of Notre Dame and an MA in Cinema and Media Studies from USC.
Advisor: Dr. J.D. Connor
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2028
Research Interests: Early American Cinema, Classical Hollywood, Performance Studies, and Representations of Race and Gender
2024-2025 NEH/VSRI Seminar Graduate Fellow
Darren Donate
English
Darren is a third-year PhD student in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. Previously, Darren received an MFA in poetry at the University of New Mexico. His creative work focuses on the multiracial working class and examines the intersections of race, power, and inequality.
Research Interests: Latinx writing, Visual Poetics, Labor Poetics, and Cultural Analytics
2023-2024 NEH/VSRI Seminar Graduate Fellow
American Studies and Ethnicity
Anna Flinchbaugh
Art History
Anna Flinchbaugh is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Art History. She works primarily on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century decorative arts and textiles, with emphasis on the intersections of gender, labor, and materiality. Her research has been supported by the William Morris Society in the United States’ Dunlap Memorial Fellowship. She received a BA in Human Ecology from Middlebury College and a dual MSLIS/MA in History of Art and Design from Pratt Institute.
Advisor: Kate Flint
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2028
American Studies & Ethnicity
Research Interests: Social Movements, Youth Activism, Chicano Movement, Gender and Sexuality, Latinx History, LGBT History, Oral History, and Archival Analysis
BA Wellesley College, 10/2016
Sarah Frontiera
English
Helen Fu
English
Dissertation: “Immobile Ontologies in Contemporary Fiction”
Advisor: Karen Tongson
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2025
Research Interests: Contemporary Fiction, Comics, and Queer Studies
Comparative Media and Culture
Adam Gill is a doctoral student in Comparative Media and Culture. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from McGill University and a Master of Letters in Art History from the University of Glasgow. His research interests include continental philosophy, critical theory, queer theory, avant-gardes, as well as contemporary public and popular cultures. He is currently researching the night in modernity and the nocturnal’s relationship to aesthetics, technologies of illumination, media and literature.
Riley Gold
Cinema and Media Studies
Riley Gold is a Ph.D. student in Cinema and Media Studies. His scholarship concerns histories and theories of automation as they relate to media and environments. He holds a research M.A. in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam.
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2028
Research Interests: Environmental Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Critical Theory, AI and Climate Change
Art History
Kathryn Griffith is a Provost Fellow and PhD student in the Department of Art History. She studies early modern Italy, and is particularly interested in how processes of translation, renovation, and restoration impact objects and histories. She is also interested in the history of the book and the history of museums and collections. Prior to USC, Kathryn earned an M.A. in History of Art from Williams College/Clark Art Institute and her B.A. from Wellesley College.
Advisor: Susanna Berger
Research Interests: Early Modern Europe and History of the Book
Pablo Obando Guzmán
Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, Spanish Track
I am a PhD student in the Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture department. I spend most of my time hanging out with (my) dogs, playing fútbol, swimming, and reading and writing literature. For my research, I am interested in the contemporary role of the social and political tensions that emerge around literature in Latin American culture: high culture and popular culture, the written and the visual, the digital and the material object, canonical and new readers, production and circulation, reading and criticism/research, and intellectual commitment and mass consumption. To address these, I am working on fútbol literature in Argentina during the 20th and 21st centuries and how its writing and the limits of its circulation reflect how nostalgia, class, and nation are still main shapers of the ways in which Latin America relates with literature.
Dissertation: “Writing and Seeing Fútbol. Imaginería Desletrada in Circulation in Argentina’s 20th and 21st Century”
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2026
Research Interests: Latin American literature, Literary Criticism, Visual Culture, Photography, Popular Culture, and Cultural Studies
Alex Hack
Cinema and Media Studies
Alex Hack is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Having previously attended Parsons School of Design, she has a background in communication and UI design, and much of her research examines digital media, the invisible, and matters of minoritized experience and embodiment that remain unreal and undervalued. Her dissertation project takes up medicine and its software as fertile ground for humanistic analysis as they force us to consider that racial harm lies too in supposed benevolence, that it has become elemental and rhizomatic, and that its killer instinct doesn’t simply resolve with more training or better data. Considering this, she utilizes her own experiences with family and chronic illness, as she aims to investigate how the logics of chattel slavery remain present in American healthcare and to counteract its specificity via the incorporation of wisdom that has long been judged unscientific. Her work can be seen in Spectator and Docalogue.
Dissertation: “Fixed and Future Bodies: Blackness and the Biomedical Imaginary”
Advisor: Tara McPherson
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2025
Religion
Jarred is a Religion PhD student in Christian Studies studying medieval religious practice & thought. A native of North Carolina, Jarred earned their B.A. in English & Art History from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2016 and a M.Div from Harvard Divinity School in 2020. With a focus on medieval women’s texts, their work looks at philosophical conceptions of space and place to explore how medieval mystics and monastic writers narrate mental pathways of visionary engagement. They are an active participant in the VSRI, most recently as a fellow for the the NEH/VSRI ‘Images out of Time’ Initiative from 2022-2024.
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2027
Research Interests: Christian Mysticism, Medieval History, Continental Philosophy of Religion, and Religious Architecture
2022-2024 NEH/VSRI Seminar Graduate Fellow
Teddy Hamstra
English
Teddy Hamstra is a PhD candidate in the English Department and a recipient of the VSGC. He specializes in the intersection between spirituality and narrative forms in American culture. He was a member of the VSRI’s inaugural cohort of National Endowment of Humanities-Images Out of Time Seminar Fellows. Prior to his PhD, Teddy completed a Masters at the University of Colorado Boulder where his thesis was “Painting the Post-Secular: The Sacred as the After in William Gaddis’ The Recognitions.” He has also published an article for the Air/Light Journal entitled “Much to Listen To: Reading William Gaddis’ J R in 2021 ” on the occasion of The New York Review of Books Classics reissue of Gaddis’ first two novels. In addition to other pieces in Air/Light, his work has appeared multiple times in the ASAP/Journal and the Grateful Dead Studies Journal.”
Dissertation: “Enchantment as a Form of Care: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Mysticism”
Advisor: Joseph A. Boone
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2025
Research Interests: Mythology, Mysticism, American cultural history, Shamanism, Embodiment, Somatic healing, and Self-Help
2022-2023 NEH/VSRI Seminar Graduate Fellow
Art History
Jessica Hanson is a Ralph and Jean Hovel Fellow and fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Art History, as well as a recipient of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. She received her BA in art history from Duke University, where she graduated summa cum laude. Her research focuses on the trajectory of sports photography in the twentieth century, particularly in the mass media environments of France, Germany and the United States. Prior to joining the department at USC, Jessica was an education intern at the Timken Museum of Art and a team leader for the international Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database. She was a 2022-23 Graduate Fellow in the NEH-funded Humanities Initiative “Images out of Time: Visual and Material Culture in a Digital Age,” and her dissertation project is supported by a Chateaubriand Dissertation Fellowship from the French Embassy.
Dissertation: “Sports, Illustrated: The Making of the Global Image in Sports Photography, 1900-1974”
Advisor: Vanessa Schwartz
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2026
Research Interests: Photography, European and American Modern Art, European and American Popular Culture, Performance Studies, and Sports
2022-2023 NEH/VSRI Seminar Graduate Fellow
Haley Hvdson
Cinema and Media Studies
Haley Hvdson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California, United States. Wielding Black feminist epistemologies, queer theory, trans studies, and histories of abolitionist praxes, her dissertation “The Senses of Justice,” researched and written under the supervision of Dr. Tara McPherson, charts the carceral as a central material-metaphor of Euro-American film and media theory from the late 19th century to the early 21st century, and looks after the practices of abolitionist media studies in the uses of carceral media infrastructures by caged people. Her work is published or forthcoming with Journal of American Studies, Spectator, Synoptique, and Routledge. She received her Bachelors at Williams College.
Dmitrii Kuznetsov
Slavic Languages and Literature
My research interests include decadent aesthetics in Russia, gender and sexuality in Russian film, and memory and post-memory in contemporary Russian novel. Currently, I am writing a dissertation on the artistic mediation of private memory as a means of resistance to the governmentally-mandate narratives on the national past in Russia.
Dissertation: “Creative Interventions: Memorial Presence in Contemporary Russian Literature and Film”
Advisor: Colleen McQuillen
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2025
Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, Media Track
Dissertation: “Experiments in Belief: Comparative Media and the Technics of Documentary”
2022-2023, 2024-2025 NEH/VSRI Seminar Graduate Fellow
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Hyejoo Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures. Prior to joining USC, Hyejoo received an M.A. in Regional Studies – East Asia from Harvard University and a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Culture from Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. She is a 2024-2025 recipient of the Korea Foundation Scholarship for Graduate Studies. Her work has been featured in Real Life. Hyejoo’s dissertation examines the motifs of vanishing and doubling women in contemporary South Korean film and online media, theorizing their interrelation and the critical potential of illegibility in such portrayals of femininity.
Advisor: Youngmin Choe
Research Interests: South Korean Cinema, Visual Culture, New Media Theory, Feminist Film and Media Studies, Transmedia Studies, Film Historiography, and Discourses around technology
Art History
Hyojung “Joomi” Lee is a PhD student in the Department of Art History. She studies Buddhist art and material culture from the fifth to tenth century in East Asia, focusing on replication practice and copies, vernacular Buddhist narratives and forms of expressions, and trans-regional network. Prior to joining USC, she has held internships at FotoFest Biennial, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and Ewha Womans University Museum. She recently co-curated an online exhibition Artistic Exchange between Korea and Japan, a collaborative project of Ewha Womans University and Kyushu University. Joomi completed the coursework for her MA in Art History at Ewha Womans University in South Korea and received her BA in Art History with an interdisciplinary studies certificate in Digital Arts and Media at the University of Texas at Austin where she graduated with honors.
Rocio Leon
American Studies and Ethnicity
Rocio’s research interests include Spanish-language media, Latinx digital culture, Globalization, Race and Ethnicity. Previous degrees include MA Purdue Univ West Lafayette, 2018, and BA Oberlin College, 2013.
Chloe Luu
Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
Erin Lynch
Creative Writing and Literature
Religion
April began her career as a professor of documentary film in the Theatre & Media Arts Department at Brigham Young University. During this time she produced and directed several award-winning films exploring religious themes. In 2006 April left academia to pursue production full-time with National Geographic Television in Washington DC. Over a period of seven years, she produced hundreds of hours of television for National Geographic Television. A desire to study religion and media led April to USC where she is currently a doctoral student in Comparative Christianities. Her research interests within religion include media studies, cultural studies, and race, ethnicity and gender studies.
Art History
Weronika Malek-Lubawski is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History. Her dissertation examines the transnational network of avant-garde artists who moved between Moscow, Poland, and Paris: including disseminating abstract art and art theories through publications, pedagogy, and museums. She spent the 2023-2024 academic year as a Fulbrighter in Poland, and received ASEEES Dissertation Completion Grant for the 2024-25 academic year. Her international research for the dissertation was also supported by the VSGC Anne Friedberg Memorial Grant and VSGC Summer Grants. Weronika earned an M.A. in Humanities at the University of Chicago and a B.F.A. with an emphasis in art history and painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Dissertation: “Between Moscow and Paris: Lodz and the Transnational Avant-Garde Network”
Advisor: Megan Luke
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2025
Research Interests: Art History, Visual Studies, and East European History
Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
Brooke McCallum’s work in visual studies began at the intercept of undergraduate training in East Asian Languages & Civilizations at Harvard University and the outset of a doctoral program in Comparative Media and Culture at USC. With a background in ethnographic methods, her dissertation locates a surfeit of still photography, illustrations, and audio production emanating from the Ryukyu Islands. Presenting a postwar lineage of protest art in these three spaces, McCallum’s critical framework weighs the precarities of life in the Global South against the durable and defiant visual metaphor of the Ryukyus, which continues to emerge in spaces far removed from the open wound of wartime trauma.
Religion
Born and raised in Southern California, Nathan earned a B.A. in Literature and Writing Studies, with a special focus in creative writing, from Cal State San Marcos. On track to becoming a Catholic priest, Nathan studied philosophy in residence at the University of San Diego, then theology at Mount Angel Seminary in Oregon where he earned an M.A. in systematic theology and an M.Div. His research focused on the religious philosophy of John Hick. Having stepped away from the priesthood on good terms, Nathan studies American Religious History, with a special focus on religion and environmental thought from the mid 19th century to the present day.
Jose E. Múzquiz
Political Science and International Relations
José E. Múzquiz is a political analyst and a former humanitarian worker. Committed with polymathy and methodological diversity, his research agendas straddle the border between Political Science and Cultural Studies. His doctoral dissertation critically engages with the “Hispanic/Latino” category in American Politics, highlighting its internal diversity using statistics, history, and identity theory. He also studies the fear among undocumented Mexican Immigrants during the Trump presidency through interviews and surveys and the responsiveness of Mexican legislators to constituents of different racial profiles by way of audit experiments. His engagement with Visual Studies stems from an interest in state identity projects and their cultural impacts, particularly focusing on monuments and nationalism at the Mexico-US border.
Advisor: Professor Jane Junn
Expected Date of Graduation: Summer 2026
Research Interests: Monuments, Nationalism, Identity, Immigration, Borderlands History, Latinidad, and Race and Ethnic Politics
Cinema and Media Studies
Wakae Nakane is a PhD candidate in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. The tentative for her dissertation is “Embodying Subjectivity: Essayism and Documentary in Postwar Japan,” and Professor Michael Renov is her advisor. Her research focuses on Japanese feminist documentaries and experimental films, developing questions around feminist historiography and promoting previously marginalized woman filmmakers.
Dissertation: “Embodying Subjectivity: Essayism and Documentary in Postwar Japan”
Advisor: Michael Renov
Expected Date of Graduation: Summer 2025
Research Interests: Documentary, Experimental Cinema, Japanese Visual Culture, and Feminist Theory and History
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Lillian Ngan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Her research interests include Sinophone and modern Chinese literature, Hong Kong-Vietnam cultural relations, transpacific studies, racial misrepresentation, and language politics. She has received USC Visual Studies Graduate Certificate Summer Research Grants, USC East Asian Studies Center Fellowship, USC Graduate School Summer Research and Writing Grants, USC The Center for Transpacific Studies Transpacific Research Funding, and her previous degree was an MA in East Asian Studies at University of Alberta.
Celeste Oon
Cinema and Media Studies
Celeste Oon is a PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies. Her work explores the negotiation of power and intimacy across online communities, as well as user-interface interaction in relation to digital subcultures. She has particular interest in online influencers, and has spent the past several years within industry creator spaces. Much of her work focuses on bringing together elements of theory and praxis in order to bridge academic and industry practice.
Advisor: Tara McPherson
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2029
Research Interests: Digital and Social Media, Platforms, Monetization, Celebrity, and Audience and Fandom
American Studies and Ethnicity
Nisarg Patel [નિસર્ગ પટેલ]
Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
Nisarg Patel [નિસર્ગ પટેલ] is a Ph.D. candidate in the Comparative Media and Culture program at USC (joined 2021). A South Asianist by training, he is currently working on a Dissertation Project titled “Passions for (an)other Past: Media, Modernity, History” under the supervision of Prof. Neetu Khanna. His work is located at the intersections of 20th-century continental theory and the histories of visual cultures of late-colonial (mid to late 19th) and post-colonial (20th century) India. Before USC, Nisarg’s academic training consists of a B.E. Production Engineering (GTU 2016); B.A. Philosophy (IGNOU 2016); B.A. English Literature and Cinema Studies (University of Toronto 2019); M.A. Comparative Literature w. focus on South Asian Studies (University of Toronto 2020).
Dissertation: “Passions for (an)other Past: Media, Modernity, History”
Advisor: Prof. Neetu Khanna
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2026
Research Interests: Colonial Visual Cultures, South Asian Studies, and French Theory
2023-2025 NEH/VSRI Seminar Graduate Fellow
Brodie Quinn
Anthropology
Brodie’s research looks at Christian nationalism and secularism in the United States. Christian nationalist movements intersect religious and political realms, as such, these groups sit at the crossroads of the biggest social issues in the United States today: race, religious freedom, historical narratives, xenophobia, reproductive and LGBTQIA+ rights. These are complex and controversial battles, and scholars have argued that these movements are more than simply an effort to influence laws or religious piety, but expansive culture-shaping frameworks through which people locate their identities and construct ideas of “us and them.” By examining emerging forms of Christian nationalism, especially what and how Christian nationalists believe and their efforts to change US civic life, Brodie is also studying how boundaries of belonging are created, how historical knowledge is (re)produced, and how secularism as both a political doctrine and an epistemic category is being reconstituted in contemporary America. When not studying religious stuff, Brodie is usually geeking out on motorcycles, photography, or trying to squeeze in more travel to somewhere new.
Advisor: Dr. Janet Hoskins
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2027
Research Interests: Anthropology of Religion, American Politics, Christianity, Ethnographic Film, and Visual Anthropology
Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
Currently, Mahmoud is a doctoral student in the Comparative Literature Track of the PhD program in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (CSLC) at USC, investigating what could be seen as dystopian and/or apocalyptic in world literature, cinema and photography from an ecocriticism lens with main focus on making connections between Middle East and Latin American in the context of Global South.
His research interests include: Translation Studies and Multilingualism, Visual Studies and Media Theory, Literary Theory, Psychoanalytic Theory, Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities in Global South, Dystopia and Apocalypse in World Cinema and Literature, Contemporary Arabic Literature and Art, and Middle Eastern Studies.
Cinema and Media Studies
Zeke Saber is a PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California (USC). His research limns the discursive contours of post-cinematic scholarship – whenever it happened to be produced. His areas of focus include filmic realism, metaphor theory, epistolarity, and immersive technology. Zeke’s work has been published in Cinephile and Film & History.
Advisor: Akira Lippit
Tania Sarfraz
Cinema and Media Studies
Tania Sarfraz is a PhD student in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies. Her research theorizes error as a hinge concept in the technology and aesthetics of expressive media forms. Specific areas of interest include glitch, poor images, opacity, and behaviorist prehistories of film and media theory’s models of the organism. She is a a 2023-24 National Endowment for the Humanities Graduate Fellow with the VSRI’s Images Out of Time seminar, and co-organizes the Levan Institute “Theory Today” working group, dedicated to exploratory readings of contemporary theory. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Notre Dame.
Advisor: Tara McPherson
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2028
Research Interests: Deconstruction and its afterlives, Aesthetics, Affect, Cinema, Global Media, and Behaviorism
2023-2025 NEH/VSRI Seminar Graduate Fellow
Art History
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 an enrollee in the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. 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.
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 Design History Society, and the Forest History Society. 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.
Dissertation: “Art of the Airwaves: American Painting, Circulation, and Radio in the 1940s”
Advisor: Kate Flint
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2026
Research Interests: American Art, Radio, Film, and Periodical Culture
Fernanda Soria Cruz
Communication
Hi! I am Fernanda, a Mexican scholar. I studied International Relations and Political Science back in Mexico at UDLAP. I also hold a graduate degree from New York University in Media, Culture, and Communication (MMC), and right now I’m working towards getting a Ph.D. in Communication at USC, where I focus on studying feminicidal violence and forced human disappearance. My work interrogates the evidential and factual authority of forensics, their discursive articulation in legal, activist, private, and public spaces, and how the phenomenon of feminicide in Mexico and other countries in Latin America materializes and gets (re)inscribed, represented, captured, performed and fictionalized.
Advisors: Josh Kun and Hector Amaya
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2027
Research Interests: Legal Anthropology, Photography, Science and Technology Studies, Media Theory: Inscription, Affect Theory, Materiality, and Phenomenology
Eve Sperling
Art History
Eve Sperling is a PhD student in the Department of Art History and a 2024–2025 NEH/VSRI Seminar Graduate Fellow. She is also a participant in the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. Her research is focused on late medieval and early modern art, particularly the art and visual culture of Northern Europe. She is interested in instances of exchange or translation between distinct artistic mediums, especially in relation to textiles. Before attending USC, Eve received her BA in Studio Art from Pitzer College and completed her MA in The History of Art and Archeology at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. More recently, she won a Kress Fellowship to attend the German School at Middlebury College. Eve has worked in a variety of art institutions and venues, and in 2023 served as Adrienne Arsht Intern in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2028
Research Interests: Late medieval and Early Modern Art, Northern Renaissance, Textiles (especially tapestries), and Intermediality
2024-2025 NEH/VSRI Seminar Graduate Fellow
Art History
Audrey Storm is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Art History. She studies American art and visual culture from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary with a focus on the North American West and the Transpacific, encompassing questions of place, nature, technology, race, and empire. Prior to joining the department, she held internships at Bonhams, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Asian American Arts Alliance. She also was a studio assistant for the artist Titus Kaphar. She holds a BA from Yale University in History of Art and Economics, where her undergraduate thesis won the Vincent D. Andrus Memorial Prize.
American Studies and Ethnicity
Dillon Sung is a multimedia artist and community organizer based in Southern California. Through conversations with Transpacific Studies, Critical Refugee Studies, and political theory, her doctoral research aims to make present the fissures in Asian and Pacific Islander racialization and political formations by drawing linkages across the development of migrant sociality and subjecthood for North Korean defectors in South Korea, undocumented Koreans in the U.S., and the practices of sovereignties that impact migrants’ possibilities for movement. She informs and engages her embodied research with an art practice through discourses of social practice, performance theory, and autoethnographic writing. She was a 2019 – 2021 Imagining America PAGE Co-Director and a 2020 – 2021 Eyebeam Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellow in collaboration with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. Dillon is a Ph.D. candidate and Provost Fellow in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
Dissertation: “The Places of Diasporic Sovereignties”
Advisors: Amelia Jones and Viet Thanh Nguyen
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2026
American Studies and Ethnicity
My work considers the aesthetic knowledges of post-1945 Asian American women artists, working explicitly or implicitly with/against the terms of US imperial warfare and democratization. I argue that Asian American feminist aesthetics — spanning sculptural weaving, camouflage, and landscape painting — mediate debates around flesh and materiality, abstraction and computation, contributing to distinctive notions of the racialized human body at historic moments when the integrity of the biological organism and human personhood were being radically revised by the industrial technologies of US militarism. Elsewhere I write fiction; my work has been recognized/published by Best of the Net, Black Warrior Review, Best American Short Stories, and Fiction Collective 2.
Advisor: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Research Interests: Asian American Studies, US Empire Studies, Feminist STS, and Media Philosophy
East Asian Languages And Cultures
Tian Jing Teh (He/Him) is a Provost Fellow and third-year PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. His research lies between the intersections of Sinophone cultures, Southeast Asian studies and environmental humanities, focusing on the inter-Asian cultural exchanges through oceanic thinking. He holds a B.A. in Chinese Studies from Xiamen University and an M.A. in the Comparative Literature and World Literature from Beijing Normal University.
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2027
Research Interests: Sinophone Literature, Southeast Asian Studies, Blue Humanities, and Environmental Media
Religion
Meg Tiller is a PhD Candidate in the Dornsife School of Religion. Her research focuses on the intersections of religion, politics, and popular culture in the United States. She is particularly interested in how material culture impacts new religious movements both through the lens of community building within the group and how this affects outsiders’ perceptions of the groups. Previous degrees: English B.A., with a concentration in British Gothic Literature, dual degree in Religious Studies and American Studies (all from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville). She is the chair of the religion and social sciences unit of the American Academy of Religion, Western Region, and just finished her Elinor Ostrom fellowship with the Mercatus Center. When not teaching or working on her dissertation, she can be found running or playing with her dog, the electric Salome.
Dissertation: “Material Maketh the Movement: How Food and Fashion Shape New Religious Movements”
Advisor: Diane Winston
Expected Date of Graduation: Summer 2025
Research Interests: American Religious History, New Religious Movements, American Politics, Food Culture, Fashion, and Counter-Culture Movements
Slavic Languages and Literatures
Kate is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at USC. She is a member of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate Program, the Digital Media and Culture Graduate Certificate Program, and the Visual Anthropology Graduate Certificate Program. She is a 2024-2025 Center for Ethnographic Media Arts (CEMA) Fellow. Kate’s academic interests revolve around early and late twentieth-century Russian literature and visual culture. Her dissertation explores the early stages of the horror genre’s development from the 1980s through the 1990s in the former Soviet Union. This research interest expands into a broader study encompassing the history of the horror genre in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland.
Dissertation: “Eastern European Horror Story: The Emergence of Horror Cinema in the Former Soviet Union”
Advisor: Ellina Sattarova
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2025
Research Interests: Eastern European Cinema, Soviet and post-Soviet Cinema, Horror films, Russian modernist and dissident literature, Visual Culture, Visual Anthropology, and Cultural History
Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
Elsa Vallot is a PhD Student in the french and francophone track, specialized in critical theory. She received her B.A in Public Law from the university of Panthéon-Sorbonne, and her M.A in Humanities and Social Sciences, theory and practices of language and art from the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS). She in interested in french and american hip-hop, francophone poetry, gender and race phenomenology, radical philosophy and politics, materialism. She writes about hardcore rap and gangsta rap, interracial alterity in France and the Indian Ocean. She is starting a project on Muay Thay fighters in France.
Sabina Villalobos
American Studies and Ethnicity
Sabina (she/hers) is a fifth year PhD student in American Studies and Ethnicity. Her research focuses on television studies, feminist media studies, youth studies, and connections to popular culture. She is interested in the roles sound, storytelling, and television play in various identity formations and has a special interest in children’s educational television. Sabina’s dissertation will focus on the concept of the complications and possibilities of “feminist worldbuilding” as a way to build a serial world on television. Talk to her about Real Housewives or PBSKids!
Advisor: Karen Tongson
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2027
Research Interests: Television History, Utopia Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Diversity and Representation in Media, and Children’s Educational Entertainment
American Studies and Ethnicity
Jason Tuan Vu (he/they) is a first-year PhD student and Provost Fellow in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department at USC. His research interrogates the intersections of settler colonialism, militarism, and carcerality in the formation of global US empire. By engaging with the issue of Southeast Asian refugee deportation, he aims to chart a critical transpacific geography that links settler-military infrastructures to expanding US carceral power. In doing so, he hopes to bring Indigenous and refugee critiques of US empire into closer conversation, pointing toward resonant histories and potential futures of solidarity and resistance.
B.A. Ethnic Studies, University of California Los Angeles, 06/2021
Art History
Elissa Watters is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History and a recipient of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. Her focus lies in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on print culture and feminist art history. Recent research projects include Kara Walker’s artist’s book “Freedom: A Fable,” the wartime drawings of little-known German artist Renate Geisberg, and the early sculptures of contemporary American artist Louisa Chase. Her dissertation, currently titled “Process as Politics: The Prints of Gerd Arntz and the Cologne Progressives, 1919–1939,” considers how a group of artists loosely based in Cologne, Germany utilized process, in addition to imagery, as a means of practicing a certain socialist politics in the years between WWI and WWII. Elissa holds a B.A. in English from Dartmouth College and an M.A. in the History of Art from Williams College and The Clark Art Institute.
Dissertation: “Process as Politics: The Prints of Gerd Arntz and the Cologne Progressives, 1919–1939″
Advisor: Amy Ogata
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2026
Research Interests: Modern European Art, Contemporary Art, Feminism, and Print Studies
Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
Lucy Whiteley is a Provost Fellow and fifth-year PhD student in French and Francophone Studies. She received her Bachelors in French and History from Cornell University with distinction in all subjects, and a Master of Studies in History from the University of Oxford in 2019. Her work explores the intersections and dialogues between avant-garde film, photography, and literature. She is particularly interested in how space changes and transforms language and imagery, and how the three-dimensional translates to the materials of page, image, and screen.
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2026
Research Interests: Spatiality, Aesthetics, Avant-garde poetics, Photography, and Nouvelle Vague
El Whittingham
Anthropology
El Whittingham is a 2nd year PhD student in the Anthropology Department. Their current research and films focus on queer kinship , community building and activism in the Francophone African Sahel, particularly in Senegalese urban spaces. Their focus on visual anthropology allows them to engage in collaborative projects with queer Senegalese filmmakers, artists and activists. Queer religious leaders and national Senegalese holidays that permit gender divergence through expression are at the current forefront of their research focus. They are also interested in French colonial archives from the late 19th and early 20th centuries with a particular focus on gender and sexuality. El graduated with B.As in French Studies and Spanish Studies from the University of Washington in 2016 and an M.A. in French Studies from UW Seattle in 2018.
2022-2024 NEH/VSRI Seminar Graduate Fellow
Ka Lee Wong
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Ka Lee Wong’s research concerns Chinese languages and cultures in the transnational context, particularly issues concerning global Chinese diaspora, media production and circulation, internet culture, censorship and language politics. While my dissertation focuses on an inter-Asia network in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia where individuals imagine and assert a Cantonese identity through a sense of “vulgarity” in language and popular culture, in my next book project, Cantonese Sea Gypsies, Mermen and Pirates: Reimagining Languages and Identities in the Inter-Asia Oceans (working title), I aim to sharpen the emphasis on theorizing the transnational Cantonese language studies by exploring the connections between the existing island and ocean studies around the world and Inter-Asia.
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Kaiyang Xu is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at University of Southern California. Her research interests are contemporary Chinese cinema and media studies, Chinese independent cinema, digital media, Sino-African relationships, the Global South, and tourism studies. Her works can be found in the MCLC Resource Center, Chinese Independent Cinema Observer, and Chinese journals Tibetan Studies (西藏研究) and Movie Literature (电影文学)
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2025
Research Interests: Cinema, Visual Culture, and Media in the Global South
Art History
Margot Yale is a Provost Fellow and PhD candidate in the Department of Art History, as well as a recipient of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. She studies American art in the twentieth century, with particular interests in printmaking, histories of the Left and organized labor, and pedagogy and community-oriented practice. Her dissertation “From Red Feminism to the Blacklist: Labor Schools and the Work of Art, 1935–1957,” considers how women artists surveilled and blacklisted by the federal government under McCarthyism built solidarity with multiracial working-class audiences through pedagogy and the structural logic of the multiple. Her project is supported by a 2024–2025 Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, as well as the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, Special Collections at the University of Michigan, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the Visual Studies Research Institute at USC. Her book chapter, “‘A Healthy Tonic’: Lucienne Bloch’s ‘The Cycle of a Woman’s Life’ and the Value of the Artist at Work,” which examines the therapeutic dimensions of mural painting for incarcerated women under the New Deal welfare state, was published in Modernism, Art, Therapy, eds. Suzanne Hudson and Tanya Sheehan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024). Margot has held positions at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (as a USC-LACMA summer research fellow), and the Museum of Modern Art, where she was a cataloguer of drawings and prints. She has curated exhibitions at Equity Gallery, Kings County Hospital (with the No Longer Empty Curatorial Lab), and the Princeton University Art Museum. She received her B.A. summa cum laude in art history and American Studies from Princeton University.
Dissertation: From Red Feminism to the Blacklist: Labor Schools and the Work of Art, 1935–1957
Advisor: Suzanne Hudson
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2026
Research Interests: Modern American Art, History of Print, and American Popular Culture
Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
Will Young is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at USC. His research focuses on New Media’s representations of blackness in the Americas. Specifically his project concentrates on the portrayals of enslaved peoples in the contemporary media distributed to a global audience. He currently serves as the research assistant for the Early Modern Studies Institute and the Humanities in a Digital World.
Prior to returning to academia, Will was a television producer and director for over fifteen years. He holds an M.F.A. in Screenwriting from the University of Miami, and a B.A. in Journalism from Miami University in Ohio.
Cynthia Zhang
Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
Cynthia Zhang is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She received a B.A. in Comparative Literature and an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, where her work focused on the intersections between new media technologies, reading practices, and fandom. At present, her research focuses on theorizing fantasy as a site for exploring the relationship between ideology and material realities. She writes creatively and has published a novel, After the Dragons, with Stelliform Press.
Dissertation: “To See with Eyes Unclouded: The Alternative Epistemologies of Fantasy Fiction”
Advisor: Antonia Szabari
Expected Date of Graduation: Spring 2025
Research Interests: Cinema, Television, Science Fiction and Fantasy
