Search | Department of History of Art and Visual Studies

Leonardo Santamaría-Montero

Leonardo specializes in Latin American art, specifically 19th-century Central American visual and material culture, with a focus on indigenous aesthetics and their representations. He is interested in analyzing the transformation of Central American visual culture during its transition from the colonial to the republican regime, and the socio-political uses of pre-Columbian art and contemporary indigenous material culture in that process.

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Priscila Dantas de Moraes

Priscila de Moraes is a PhD Candidate at Cornell University. She is part of the History ofArt and Archaeology track, and her research focuses on the lateantique architecture of the Near East. She has studied at the Universities of Campinas (BA) and Paris (M), and has participated in archaeological works in Caesarea and Amman.

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Cynthia Robinson

I am committed to an interdisciplinary investigation of the visual, literary, courtly and religious manifestations of cultural and confessional contact and interchange in the Mediterranean world, between 1000 and 1500 A.D., with particular focus on the Iberian peninsula. Recently, and following a very long hiatus, I have also returned to fiction. I anticipate that the scholarly and literary strands will begin to intersect. There may even be cross-pollination.

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Jolene K. Rickard

Jolene Rickard is an Associate Professor at Cornell University in the departments of History of Art and Art, and the former Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program 2008-2020 (AIISP). She is a visual historian, artist and curator interested in the intersection of Indigenous art, cultural theory and the forces of settler colonialism. Her research centers on the expression of multiple sovereignties within Indigenous art and culture globally.

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Peggy Chao

Peggy’s research focuses primarily on material culture of tea in East Asia, with particular interests in the modern development of tea cultures. Currently, she is investigating the development of tea culture in Taiwan with an emphasis on rituals, objects, and identity-making.

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Catherine Rucker

Catherine earned her B.A. in Art History from the University of Central Florida and her M.A. Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies from Florida State University. Her interests lie in studying African American Art History andconcepts centered on the construction of identity and the maintenance of subjectivity and selfhood.

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Ayesha Matthan

Ayesha Matthan is a PhD candidate from India. She has degrees in Literature in English, Journalism, and Visual Studies from St Stephen’s College, Delhi; Asian College of Journalism in Chennai; and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, respectively. She has worked with The Hindu as an arts journalist, The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts as a research scholar, and India Foundation for the Arts as a communications editor. Her PhD dissertation is tentatively titled “Looking for Bombay/Mumbai/Bambai: Photography, Identity, and the City, 1970s-1990s.” She teaches a First Year Writing Seminar titled Rear Window/Side Mirror: Looking and Writing the City. She also works now and then at the Johnson Museum as a Curatorial Assistant to preserve her sanity.

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Meita Estiningsih

Meita’s research investigates the impact of the Japanese occupation in Indonesia, 1942-1945, on the war memories of both Japan as the occupier and Indonesia as the occupied, particularly the ones that are mediated by audio-visual media, such as films. She looks into how Japan and Indonesia institutionalize and politicize war memories and how individual and collective memories represented through films also play a significant role in the construction of war historical narratives. She explores how film functions as linking past and present events into a whole; mediating people's memories of wartime, the first persons who had experienced the war, and the later generations’ memories and perceptions of the war.

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Alice Clinch

Alice studies the art and architecture of the ancient Mediterranean, integrating scientific approaches to the study of craft practices with a focus on pigment production and painted plaster. Her dissertation provides the first formal analysis and publication of material from three archaeological sites in Greece and Sicily, investigating the use of pigments in domestic decoration from the Classical to Late Hellenistic periods. Alice’s research has been generously supported by grants and fellowships from the A. G. Leventis Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the Fitch Laboratory of the British School at Athens, and the Getty Conservation Institute, amongst others. Alice has conducted fieldwork in Greece, Italy and Cyprus and is currently active on a number of projects in Greece and Italy as the specialist in pigments and painted architecture.

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Verity Platt

I specialize in Greek and Roman art history, and have a particular interest in the relationship between ancient literary and visual cultures, especially in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

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Astara Light

Astara’s research centers on the work of modern and contemporary Indonesian artists who employ a diverse range of visual techniques and philosophical approaches to speak to global issues. Her dissertation tentatively titled: “Hauntings in contemporary Indonesian art: Tracing cosmological and ecological knowledge through exhibition histories” centers on the work of artists from Bali and Java who engage with different media including painting, sculpture, and installation art. Her research considers the impact of artists exhibiting their work nationally and internationally, including in Japan and Singapore. Her dissertation aims to highlight how artists visually convey ecological problems by drawing on spiritual perspectives unique to Indonesia. Astara’s earlier research interests have also examined Indonesian art alongside topics of performance and movement theory, religious studies, indigeneity, and national identity.

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Gilda Posada

Gilda is a Xicana cultural worker from Southeast Los Angeles. Her interdisciplinary practices are rooted in working from, with, and by the Xicanx community. Gilda’s projects are invested in decolonial practices that challenge hegemonic patriarchal and heteronormative oppressive structures. Her research interest includes decolonial theory and its formation through Xicanx Studies, the evolution of Xicanx identity and its visualization through art and curation, and Xicanx art social engagement in methodologies and curriculum.As a visual artist she utilizes printmaking, fabric/weaving, and a digital process to bring forward concepts of intersectionality dealing with: identity formation, queerness, gender, nepantla, mestizaje, radical third-world feminism, trauma, liberation, alternative healing methods, democracy, and decolonial practices. She is an active member of the artist collective Espacio Tercero (www.espaciotercero.com). Her work has been exhibited nationally, most notably in the 6th Chicana Chicano Biennial. She has been featured in publications such as Art Practical and Third Woman Press Anthology.Gilda received her AB from UC Davis in Chicana/o Studies and Comparative Literature. She graduated with a dual degree from California College of the Arts in the MFA Social Practice program and the M.A. Visual and Critical Studies program. Prior to her graduate work, she served as the Curator for Galería de la Raza in San Francisco, CA and Assistant Director for Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer in Woodland, CA.

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Kaitlin Emmanuel

My areas of inquiry include popular media as a site of memory making, dissident visual cultures, and geographies of belonging in diasporas of the Global South. I received a B.A. in History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley (2011), followed by an M.A. in Asian Studies from Cornell University (2017), in which I examined the socio-political legacies that condition art making in Sri Lanka’s modernist avant-garde. My dissertation project is concerned with the mobilization of visual production in the face of state persecution and violence in Sri Lanka from the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary period. This project is informed by studies of alternative modernisms, critical theory, and diaspora studies.

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An-Yi Pan

An-yi Pan’s primary research focus is Chinese art, particularly Chinese Buddhist art and Taiwanese art. In the Buddhist art field, he explores the relationship between images and religious practices. His first book, Painting Faith: Li Gonglin and Northern Song Buddhist Culture, addresses how ancient Chinese literati engaged in Buddhist practices in a Confucian-dominated society. In recent years, An-yi Pan has been curating exhibitions and writing about Taiwanese art. Since 2004 he has curated three exhibitions on contemporary Taiwanese art at the Johnson Museum of Art. Each exhibition has been accompanied by a scholarly exhibition catalogue. He is also a Council member of the Taiwanese Art Association, and Advisory Board member of Art Taiwan magazine published by the National Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan. His forthcoming book, Embattled Modernity: Postwar Taiwanese Art, examines key issues concerning art historical debates in the two decades immediately after World War II.

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Elizabeth Emrich

Liz's research interests are in modern art in China during the late Qing and Republican eras, and the intersections of visual arts, print publication, and literature with nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and modernity during this time. Her dissertation focuses on Chinese modern woodblock prints and Lu Xun's involvement in their promotion and dissemination. Further research areas include Chinese performance art from the 1990s and its photographic documentation and circulation, as well as wayang and…

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Kristen Streahle

Specializing in medieval Italian art and architecture, Kristen studies the intersection of European and Islamic visual culture in the Mediterranean basin during the medieval period. In her dissertation, "Crafting Nobility in Trecento Sicily: The Painted Ceiling of the Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri," she treats the seafront palace, which features the most intact cycle of late-medieval paintings on the island, as a case study with which to examine the later Crusades, the shifting place of minority…

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Qilin Yang

Qilin’s research interest is in the material culture along the Silk Road from the first to the sixth century A.D.

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Lauren van Haaften-Schick

Lauren’s research examines historical intersections of art and law, with a focus on artists’ contracts and artists’ rights laws. Her dissertation examines these issues through the case-study of The Artist’s Reserved Rights, Transfer, and Sale Agreement, developed by conceptual art exhibition organizer and publisher Seth Siegelaub with lawyer Robert Projansky in New York, 1971. Adjacent research interests include artists’ books and multiples, conceptual art, the art market, and racial, gender,…

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Constanza Salazar

Constanza Salazar is a Canadian art historian and theorist based in New York City. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University focused on researching how artists since the 1990s have responded with criticism to advanced technologies like biotechnology, the internet, surveillance, and more recently, artificial intelligence. Artists employ a number of tactics for uncovering the inherent biases in algorithmic technologies as well as use performance, hacktivism, robotics, and…

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Hannah Ryan

A Doctoral Candidate in Visual Studies, Hannah Ryan researches representations of women and children within the visual and literary culture of the Transatlantic. Through a decolonial and feminist approach, her dissertation is a socio-political history of infant feeding in the Americas told through visual culture, situating breastmilk as a substance of particular value. Her work is informed by theories of labor, domesticity, consumption, and resistance, and is inherently interdisciplinary,…

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Anissa Rahadiningtyas

My primary research area is the history of modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia and my dissertation focuses on Islamicate art and visual tradition in the works of artists in Indonesia. I use the approach of the history of movement and circulation of visualities and materialities that were brought by the global network of Islam in the Indian Ocean. My interests include postcolonial theory, ocean studies, comparative modernisms, diaspora, and religious studies. I received a B.F.A. in…

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Jessica Plant

Jessica studies the art and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean with a focus on Roman and Late Antiquity. Her research interests include the social and cultural dimensions of ornament and craft production; relational approaches to material culture and pre-modern media; the history of archaeology; and the archaeology of religion and domestic space. Her dissertation project is a critical history of stucco in Roman antiquity, broadly construed (ca. 200 BCE – 700 CE), which traces the medium from the ancient Mediterranean to its transformation in Late Antiquity, and accounts for disparate statuses of stucco within subfields of the History of Art. She has participated in archaeological projects in Italy and Turkey, most recently at the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis and the Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project.

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Asli Menevse

Asli Menevse’s primary area of investigation is European visual culture during the 19th and early 20th centuries, with an emphasis on radical print culture.
Asli arrived in the discipline of Art History from an interdisciplinary background: a B.A. in Political Sciences and Sociology, and a M.A. in History with a concentration in the nineteenth-century Ottoman print culture. She then stepped into visual studies attending the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University where she received her…

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Alison McCann

Ali earned her B.A. at the University of New Hampshire, with a major in history, concentrated in religious history, and minors in art history, political science, and Middle Eastern studies. She received her MSc. in Renaissance and Early Modern studies from the University of Edinburgh. Focused on the Italian Renaissance, she is interested in the intersection of religious thought and art during the Reformation and Counter Reformation, artistic censorship, artistic criticism, and the history of…

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Kanitra Fletcher

Kanitra Fletcher's research focuses on avant-garde art by black American artists from the 1920s to the 1970s. She also has published articles on contemporary art of the black diaspora as it relates to gender, labor, body politics, self-representation and racial identification. Fletcher is the curator of video art for Landmarks, the public art program of the University of Texas at Austin. She earned a BA in English Literature at Rutgers University—New Brunswick and an MA in Latin American…

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