Graduate Students
GRADUATE STUDENTS
Alina Cui
alinacui@g.harvard.eduMedieval/Early Modern
Alina Cui studies medieval and early modern Spanish art and its connections to northern Europe, especially the Low Countries. Her research spans painting, sculpture, and manuscripts, tied together by an interest in the visual environment cultivated by...
Ruolin Gong
Early Medieval East Asian
Ruolin Gong studies early to medieval East Asian art, with a particular focus on Chinese and Korean material culture, dress, and interregional exchange. Her research centers on intermediality as evidence of contact, transmission, and reinvention, tracing...
Victoria Hazell
Victoria studies the art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particular interests in the French Revolution and Enlightenment thought. She graduated from UCLA with a BA in Art History, and holds an MA degree from Columbia University. In her...
Alexis Kelly
Photography
Alexis studies the intersection of photography and politics in the 20th century, with a focus on Germany during periods of authoritarianism. She is especially interested in researching state intervention into the development of color photography. Her...
Minkang Park
Minkang conducts research on two subjects in Japanese Buddhist painting. One focuses on the concept of scale and its visual and religious implications, with a particular emphasis on Japanese nirvā ṇa paintings. The other is the cultural and artistic...
John Weaver
John Weaver studies the visual culture of early medieval South and Southeast Asia. His work focuses on the spread and development of Śaivism across the Deccan plateau and Indian Ocean, adopting an ecocritical approach to understand the relationship...
Diego Atehortúa
datehortua@fas.harvard.eduLatin American and Caribbean
Diego Atehortúa studies the bridges of Latin American and Caribbean arts with Atlantic Africa from the early modern slave trade to the aftermath of slavery in the long nineteenth century. His research interests include the Atlantic and Pacific currents of...
Samira Bose
samirabose@g.harvard.eduSouth Asia Art, Modern (20th Century)
Samira Bose studies the production of archives and museum collections in late twentieth-century South Asia, with a particular focus on art historical and anthropological documentation by artists. Her interests stem from her work at Asia Art Archive in...
Christian Bumala
cbumala@g.harvard.eduModern (20th Century)
Christian Bumala studies sound and its representation in modern art, with a particular focus on the human voice. Drawing from disability studies and transhistorical approaches, his research considers the affordances of speech and song as visual objects...
Yomi Folaranmi
yomifolaranmi@fas.harvard.eduPhotography
Yomi Folaranmi studies the politics (and poetics) of representation and relation across the Atlantic from the 1800s. His current research takes Afro-Brazilian religious and visual culture as a point of departure to explore the cultural and artistic...
Madeleine Giaconia
mgiaconia@g.harvard.eduModern (20th Century)
Madeleine Giaconia studies modernism and empire in the Soviet Union, with a particular interest in the role of visual culture in interactions between Ukraine and Uzbekistan in the early twentieth century. Her research also considers how the art of the...
Ian Karp
iankarp@g.harvard.eduNorthern Renaissance
Ian studies images and objects at the intersection of faith, artistic practice, and intellectual culture in northern Europe during the long seventeenth century. Drawing upon prints, illustrated books, and representations of the natural world, Ian’s work...
Santiago Olábarri Oriol
solabarrioriol@fas.harvard.eduEarly Modern Hispanic World
Santiago studies early modern art and visual culture in the Hispanic world with a dual focus on religious images—particularly as records and as agents in processes of conversion—and on the intersection of knowledge and art production in the sixteenth and...
Shireen Shah
shireenshah@g.harvard.eduIslamic
Shireen Shah is a PhD student in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. She studies the transregional material exchanges of the early Islamic caliphates, particularly at their Eastern borders. Her research...
Erik Zou
erikzou@g.harvard.eduModern (18th and 19th Century)
Erik Zou studies the visual culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. He is particularly interested in networks that connected artistic, scientific, and commercial forms of knowledge, and how these collaborations contributed to the development...
Fernando Casamayor Molina
fcasamayormolina@g.harvard.eduIslamic Architecture
Fernando Casamayor Molina studies the archaeological landscape of Iraq during the early Islamic period. His research explores how urbanism and architecture reflect broader questions of inequality, state formation, and social control. He earned his...
Cameron Chacon
cameronchacon@fas.harvard.eduAncient Greek
Cameron Chacon is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture focusing on ancient Greek material culture. They are particularly interested in visual humor and representations of women, satyrs, and Amazons on vases from the Archaic...
Adam Chen
adamchen@g.harvard.eduAmerican Art
Adam Chen is a historian and curator of American art from approximately 1750 to 1850. Taking a global, intercultural approach, his research interests include the artist Benjamin West (1738 - 1820) and his Anglo-American contemporaries, Chinese export...
Jess Chen
jesschen@fas.harvard.eduModern Art
Jess Chen studies modern art with a focus on Central Asia. Her research engages with nomadic philosophies; concepts of nationhood and empire; relationships between material culture, tactility, and avant-garde practices; and histories of ornament. Before...
Emma Harutyunyan
emma_harutyunyan@g.harvard.eduEarly Modern (Armenian Art)
Emma Harutyunyan's professional focus is on early modern Armenian art, with a particular emphasis on Armenian religious textiles. She has a background in curation and cultural management. Her research centers on the intersection of trade networks...
Jiwon Lee
jiwon_lee@fas.harvard.eduEarly Modern
Jiwon Lee studies the interpenetrating relationship between art and science by focusing on early modern metal sculpture. Perceiving each work as a compound of form, material, and technology, she explores how traveling metal sculptures contributed to the...
Khushi Nansi
khushinansi@fas.harvard.eduIslamic Art
Khushi Nansi studies women’s spaces of disobedience in the pre-modern Islamic world. Through exchanges at board games, she investigates notions of the “unseen” in a thirteenth-century Iberian manuscript . Her interests are transhistorical, spanning from...
Tan Yi-Ern Samuel
samtan@fas.harvard.eduJapanese Art
Samuel Tan studies clothing and dressmaking in postwar Japan and the emergence of contemporary Japanese Fashion. Located in the development of drawing, cutting, and sewing technologies/techniques in such institutions as Bunka Fukusō Gakuin, Samuel’s work...
Hiroki Takezaki
Japanese
Hiroki conducts research on two subjects in early modern Japanese paintings. One focuses on the stylistic changes in the work of Maruyama Ōkyo, active in eighteenth-century Kyoto, and the way in which they correspond to his relationships with different...
Irina Zhambaldorzhieva
irina_zhambaldorzhieva@g.harvard.eduBuddhist Art
Irina Zhambaldorzhieva studies the history of Buddhist art, focusing on Esoteric (Tantric) iconography. She is particularly interested in the iconographic transformations that occurred as the Tantric teachings were transmitted from India and Nepal to...
Nicanor Albornoz
Architecture
Nicanor studies the history and theory of modern architecture. He is interested in the dissemination of French academic culture, particularly in Latin America, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His work focuses on object´s political agency...
John DeVoy
jdevoy@fas.harvard.eduByzantine
John DeVoy is a first-year PhD student interested in the peripheral regions of the Early Byzantine world and their representation of local heterodoxy versus imperial orthodoxy through miniatures, wall paintings, and icons. He is also interested in the...
Lauren Ehrmann
laurenehrmann@g.harvard.eduIslamic Art
Lauren Ehrmann's research focuses on North African and Andalusian manuscripts. She is interested in depictions of urban space, travel, cross-cultural exchange, and the relationship between manuscripts and the body. Prior to attending Harvard, Lauren was...
Icey Lin
East Asian
Icey Lin is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She specializes in East Asian art, especially the art and architecture of early- to middle-period China (c. 3rd century BCE to 13th century CE). Her...
Noah Michaud
nmichaud@g.harvard.eduEarly Modern (African Art)
Noah Michaud’s research centers around the real and virtual encounters between Italy, chiefly the Republic of Venice, and sub-Saharan Africa in the early modern era. He studies the visual, material, and expressive cultures that contour these encounters...
Anthony Ortega
Ancient Greek
Anthony’s area of study revolves around the art, archaeology, and culture of ancient Greece during the eighth through fifth centuries BCE. His research primarily focuses on depictions of eroticism and images of daily life, with the aim of gaining deeper...
Byron Otis
Northern Baroque
Byron studies visual culture between Europe and America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His research interests extend from the cultural centers of northern and central Europe to the Ibero-American world, focusing particularly on their entwined...
Luci Williams
Modern (20th Century)
Luci Williams’ studies are animated by an interest in textiles: their design, production, and the lives of the people–and animals–that make them. She looks forward to exploring this in the context of Soviet Central Asia. A graduate of Oberlin College...
Nolan Boomer
nolanboomer@fas.harvard.eduArchitecture
Nolan studies the modern built environment, media, and cultural exchange across the Western Hemisphere. Their work looks at popular architecture through cultural studies and historical materialist lenses. They received a B.A. in English at Oberlin College...
Natasha Coleman
natashacoleman@g.harvard.eduEighteenth and Nineteenth Century
Natasha’s research focuses on the visual cultures that emerged via the explosion of direct contact between Western Europe and late imperial China from the early seventeenth century until the fall of the Manchu Qing Empire in 1911. Multidirectional and...
Jordan Hallmark
jhallmark@g.harvard.eduSeventeenth and Eighteenth Century
Jordan’s research investigates networks of cultural transmission between France and Italy—outside the institutional venues of art academies—that led to the development of an increasingly homogenized visual language of European aristocratic and princely...
Timothy Hampshire
thampshire@g.harvard.eduLate Antique and Medieval Art
Timothy Hampshire (Tim) studies medieval art with a focus on Late Antiquity. He is especially interested in the early Christian period in Rome, including book culture, epigraphy, and narrative art. His dissertation project reexamines the illustrations of...
April Peng
xueyangpeng@fas.harvard.eduChinese Art
April studies Buddhist art and visual culture of medieval East Asia. She is particularly interested in art's role in the visualization of processes that concern the conceiving and sustaining of life beyond the physical body. Her past projects have focused...
Ayesha Shaikh
ashaikh@g.harvard.eduIslamic
Ayesha U. Shaikh is a doctoral candidate of Islamic architecture and urbanism in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Indian Ocean maritime connectivity in relation to visual and architectural...
Raghunath Akarsh
raghunathakarsh@g.harvard.eduSouth and Southeast Asian Art
Akarsh studies the trans-regional interactions of Buddhist material culture across the Indian Ocean with a focus on locating Tamiḻakam in the South-Southeast Asian cultural encounters of Southern Buddhism. Akarsh holds a BA in History from University of...
Sandro Capo Chichi
sandrocapochichi@g.harvard.eduHistorical African Arts
Sandro Capo Chichi is a PhD candidate studying historical African arts with a focus on the Bight of Benin area in West Africa. He received his M.A. in Art History and Archaeology from the Université Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne in 2019. His dissertation...
Catarina Flaksman
catarinaflaksman@g.harvard.eduModern Architecture
Catarina's research focuses on architecture, exhibitions, modernity, and national identity in the twentieth century. She is particularly interested in the production of modern architecture in Brazil and its transnational exchanges within the Americas...
Aziza Izamova
azizaizamova@g.harvard.eduModern (Twentieth Century)
Aziza Izamova studies the history of the museums and the art of Soviet Central Asia. Her current interests include history of Central Asian art institutions, art production in Soviet Uzbekistan, and Russian ethnographic missions. Her B.A. thesis...
Kacper Koleda
kacperkoleda@g.harvard.eduModern (Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century)
Kacper works on the notions of health and disease, and their manifestations in art, architecture and their respective discourses. He is particularly fascinated by the concept of monstrosity, which emerges in relation to those two terms. Previously, during...
Trevor Menders
tmenders@g.harvard.eduHistorical Japanese Arts
Trevor works broadly on the history of Japanese art from the medieval through modern periods. His dissertation investigates depictions of live performance at the turn of the 17th century, reaching across disciplines to bring together critical study of the...
Ebonie Pollock
eboniepollock@g.harvard.eduArts of African Diaspora (Twentieth Century)
Ebonie is interested in researching the cultural arts of the early-twentieth century African Diaspora, with particular emphasis on theories of the archive networks of intellectual and artistic collaboration among Black women. She is a Presidential Scholar...
Rebecca Selch
rselch@g.harvard.edu Rebecca Selch is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her research concerns the production and reception of drawing and painting in Safavid Iran. Her dissertation, tentatively titled...
Walid Akef
wakef@g.harvard.eduIslamic Art & Architecture
After studying Islamic art and architecture at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Walid was appointed as teaching assistant in the Department of Archaeology at the same university, an office that he maintained until 2016. His interest in Andalusi studies led...
Alexandra Dennett
adennett@g.harvard.eduModern Art
Alexandra Dennett studies modern art and the history of photography. Her dissertation examines how photographs both represent and misrepresent the transformations of modern Central Asia from 1890–1940, a period animated by successive waves of imperialism...
Rachel Hirsch
rhirsch@g.harvard.edu Rachel Hirsch studies the cultural history of early modern South Asia. Her research is geared towards understanding the construction of cities and gardens, theorizing urbanism and territoriality, and experimenting with new research methods. Rachel has...
Elena Janney
elenajanney@g.harvard.eduEarly Modern
Elena Janney works on the visual culture of the early modern Age of Encounter, with a particular focus on European expeditionary art of the late-fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She is interested in the transmission of artistic practices and materials...
Tai Mitsuji
tmitsuji@g.harvard.eduModern / 18th and 19th century
Tai Mitsuji is a writer and curator who is interested in disrupting the thematic and temporal modularity of art history. Rather than being pinned to a single era, his work seeks to track ideas across both time and culture – drawing a line, for instance...
Nora Rosengarten
nrosengarten@g.harvard.eduPrintmaking, 19th and 20th C American/European art
Nora Rosengarten (she/her) studies the history of printmaking from the 19th C to the present in Europe and the Americas. Her scholarship is animated by methodologies of materiality and process, as well as queer and feminist theories of knowledge, affect...
Rachel M Tang
racheltang@g.harvard.edu Rachel M. Tang studies the history and theory of socially engaged art practices, with a particular interest in artists who touch upon issues of pedagogy and ecology. Before coming to Harvard, Rachel received her B.A. in Art History from the University of...
Gabriella Wellons
gwellons@g.harvard.eduPre-Hispanic Latin America
Gabriella Wellons’ research examines the visual and material cultures of Pre-Hispanic Latin America with a particular interest in polychrome mural painting and relief sculpture of ancient Peru. Her early fieldwork examined Moche graffiti imagery incised...
Joseph Mizhakii Zordan
jzordan@fas.harvard.eduAmerican and Indigenous North American Art
Joseph Mizhakiiyaasige Zordan is a PhD Candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. His scholarly research examines the intersections of European/Euro-American and Indigenous North American art and history, and the material...
Victoria Andrews
vandrews@g.harvard.eduSouth Asian Art
Victoria just completed her MA at the University of Chicago Divinity School studying the religious history of South Asia. During her masters studies, she was primarily interested in the incorporation of visual materials and art objects in consecration and...
Rachel Burke
reburke@g.harvard.eduAmerican
Rachel Burke is a PhD student studying American art and visual culture, with a focus on representational legacies inherited from the 18 thand 19 thcenturies. During her time at the Williams College/ Clark Art Institute Graduate Program in the History of...
Amy Chang
amychang@g.harvard.eduSpanish Empire & Indo-Pacific contacts
Amy Y.T. Chang works on the art and architecture of the Spanish Empire and the results of its contact with Indo-Pacific cultures in the 16th-18th centuries. Her research focuses on the construction and reception of the ‘Spanish Islamic’ in Andalusia and...
Aimé Cichero
aime_cichero@g.harvard.eduLatin American
Aimé Cichero received her BA in Art History from Brown University in 2017. She specializes in Pre-Columbian Andean art, with a particular interest in Moche material culture. Her research concerns include materiality, agency, the relationship of art with...
Michael Norton
michael_norton@g.harvard.eduChinese Art
Michael graduated from Tsinghua University in spring 2019, receiving his MA in art history and theory with a focus on Chinese Buddhist art and archaeology. His current research addresses a group of multi-tiered, modular Northern Dynasties sculptural...
María Salvador
mariasalvador@fas.harvard.eduJapanese Art
María Salvador completed her BA in History of Art at the Universidad de Granada in 2012, which included an exchange at UC Berkeley. Her interest in Japanese religious art led her to complete an MA in Japanese Studies at SOAS, University of London in 2013...
Ji Mary Seo
jiseo@g.harvard.eduLatin American Art
Mary’s research is focused on the visual and material traditions of the ancient Americas, particularly those seen in the Lambayeque Valley on the North Coast of Peru. She is interested in the intermediality between pictorial and textual systems of...
Kaila Howell
kaila_howell@g.harvard.edu18th-19th Century
Kaila Howell works on the history and theory of art from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, with particular interest in the intersections between art and philosophy during the early Romantic period. Her dissertation is a study of Philipp Otto Runge...
