Current Graduate Students

If you would like to contact one of the graduate students in the department, please send an email to arthist@usc.edu and your message will be forwarded to the appropriate individual. Students who have attained "All But Dissertation" status are designated as ABD.

Priyanka Basu
	Priyanka is a doctoral candidate specializing in modern art and the history of the discipline of art history in Germany. During 2009-11 she will be Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, where she will complete her dissertation, "Kunstwissenschaft and the 'Primitive': Excursions in the History of Art History, 1890-1925." During 2009-10 she will also be a DAAD Research Grantee, affiliated with the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Priyanka received a Fulbright Scholarship for dissertation research in Germany in 2007-8. She has worked as a Research Assistant at the Getty Research Institute. Priyanka has presented papers at the USC Graduate Student Symposium and the Fulbright Berlin Seminar. In summer 2009 she participated in eikones Summer School Bildprojektionen in Basel. She previously received her M.A. in Theory and Criticism.
Cathrine Besancon
	Cathrine Besancon advanced to doctoral candidacy in summer of 2008. Her research focuses on twelfth-century Romanesque sculpture in southern France. Cathrine is currently a Chateaubriand fellow (2009-2010) working on her dissertation, “The French Romanesque Portals of Moissac, Souillac and Beaulieu: A Response to the Papal Reform Movement and Popular Heresy,” which explores the response in monumental sculpture to the challenges posed to Church authority both from within, the papal reform movement, and from without, the rise for popular heresy. Cathrine presented papers related to her dissertation at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds in the summer of 2009 and at the Visualizing Religion Seminar, an interdisciplinary meeting of faculty and graduate students at USC in the spring of 2008. For the summer of 2009, Cathrine was awarded the International Field Research Award from USC to conducted dissertation research in France. Cathrine has also received the Getty Memorial Scholarship (Summer 2007), USC Provost Fellowship (2005 - 2007) and the Phi Beta Kappa Graduate Study Award (2005). She received her M.A. in Art History from USC in 2007 and her B.A. from UCLA in 2005, where she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.
Nicholas Cipolla
	Nick entered the program with a B.A. in Art History and Classical Civilization (with distinctions in both majors) from Yale University and received his M.Phil. in Classics at the University of Cambridge. His current work is focused in the realm of Classical Art, primarily the art of Rome. He has worked extensively on imperial portraiture, the Roman Art Market, and on the concept of the child in Roman Art. Other interests include the use of technology in the study of archaeology, and he has presented and published papers at several conferences, including the Archaeological Institute of America Conference, Stanford University, and the University of London. Nick has also been a research assistant at the Getty Research Institute. He has recently passed his qualifying exams and is working on his dissertation tentatively titled "The Visual Imagery of Infancy and Pre-Adolescence in Roman Italy and the West" while on a Provost's Fellowship.
Ellen Dooley
	Ellen is in her second year in the Ph.D. program after graduating cum laude from Trinity University with a B.A. in Art History and Religion (comparative). Ellen plans to specialize in seventeenth-century Spanish painting. Ellen defined her area of study following a course taken her first semester at USC and her involvement with a study day exploring Golden Age Seville hosted by the J. Paul Getty Museum. She focuses on works commissioned for the decoration of hospitals in Seville. Thanks to a grant from the Del Amo Foundation, she spent the summer of 2009 in Madrid and Seville, investigating religious art housed in various healing spaces.
Jason Goldman
	Jason studies twentieth-century American art, the history of photography, and matters of gender, race, and sexuality in visual culture. Having advanced to doctoral candidacy in May 2007, he is currently at work on his dissertation, which examines the intersection of U.S. sexual politics and American art of the 1960s. His article on the nineteenth-century photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden appeared in the February 2006 issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Jason participated in two panels at the 2006 conference of the College Art Association, giving papers on von Gloeden and the American artist Robert Smithson; at the 2008 meeting of CAA, he co-chaired a panel for the Queer Caucus. He has also given papers at Cornell University, USC, and UCLA. Jason earned his BA from Bates College in 2000 and received his MA in Art History from USC in 2005. He is currently a predoctoral fellow in residence at the Smithsonian American Art Musuem.
Sarah Goodrum
	This is Sarah's third year in the Ph.D. program at USC. She graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in English in 1998, and enjoyed a career in trade and academic publishing before pursuing her M.A. in art history at Vanderbilt University. Her M.A. thesis, titled "Photograph, Painting, Persona: Dialectics of Presence in the Work of Egon Schiele," treats the relationship between photographic images of the artist and his own work. At USC, she specializes in modern European art, in particular early 20th century Central Europe. She is currently developing a dissertation project that will examine photography and its display and distribution in book form in Germany and Austria between 1900 and 1930.
Kate Hanson
	Kate Heckmann Hanson is a Ph.D candidate specializing in early modern Italian visual culture. She earned a BA from Tulane University and MA in Art History from USC. Her dissertation, “Visualizing Culinary Culture in Seventeenth-Century Florence and Parma” analyzes the relationships between culinary and medical literature, the collecting of still life paintings of food, and archival documentation of gastronomic activities at courts. She recently presented a paper at the University of Warwick for the conference “Reading and Writing Recipe Books: 1600-1800.” Kate was the recipient of a USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Fellowship as well as a Kress Travel Fellowship. With the Kress, she worked for four months in Florence, Italy in 2007 and is currently in Parma completing her dissertation research.
Jason Hill
	Beginning Fall 2009, Jason Hill will continue work on his dissertation, "The Artist as Reporter: The PM News Picture, 1940-1948" in residence at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. as the 2009-10 Patricia and Phillip Frost Predoctoral Fellow in American art and visual culture. Jason was also recently awarded a 2009-2010 Swann Foundation Fellowship by the Library of Congress for the study of comics and cartoons. Previoulsy, he has received a 2008-09 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art and a 2006 CASVA/Ailsa Mellon Bruce Predoctoral Fellowship for Historians of American Art to Travel Abroad.This summer Jason is writing parts his dissertation in France, where he is a Terra Foundation Summer Resident in Giverny. While in France, Jason presented one chapter of his dissertation at "Caught in the Act: Re-Thinking the History of Photojournalism," at the Chateau la Bretesche in Missillac. Components of his research were also recently presented at the University of California, Santa Barbara and at a conference in Montreal co-sponsored by eikones and McGill. Jason's article, "The Camera and the 'Physiognomic Auto-da-fe': Photography, History, and Race in Two Recent Works by Ken Gonzales-Day," appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of X-TRA.
Anca Lasc
	Anca Lasc studies interior design and the history of display in both public and private spaces in nineteenth-century Europe. She received her B.A. from Jacobs University Bremen, Germany, in 2004 and her M.A. from USC in 2006. Her most recent work focuses on French collectors and decorators in Second Empire and Third Republic Paris. With the help of a Borchard Foundation Fellowship, Anca is currently at work on her dissertation, "Designing Space: Architectural Environments and Modern Display in Nineteenth-Century France." Other research interests include the history of museum institutions and the reception of public art. On these topics, Anca has presented papers at UCLA, Johns Hopkins, and the Dahesh Museum of Art. In spring 2008, she received the USC Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.
Alexandra Le Blanc
	Aleca studies modern art with a focus on Latin America. Her dissertation, “Mixing Modernisms at the Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (1948-1963),” looks at the various ways internationally recognized modernist languages, such as concrete art and International Style architecture, among others, were appropriated by Brazilians and put on display in Rio at mid-century. Interested in representations of nationalism and internationalism, in 2006 at the College Art Association’s annual conference, Aleca presented her paper about the construction of brasilidade in Brazil’s national pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In 2010, she will co-chair CAA’s first session devoted to representations of Brazil, from the colonial period through the contemporary. She has made several trips to Rio de Janeiro where she studied Portuguese and conducted dissertation research at the Museu de Arte Moderna and in the Mário Pedrosa archives at the Biblioteca Nacional, with the assistance of a Getty Memorial Scholarship, a Foreign Language Area Studies fellowship and USC’s International Summer Field Research award. Prior to coming to USC, Aleca was a curatorial assistant in the Modern and Contemporary Art Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she worked on the exhibition, "Beyond Geometry; Experiments in Form, 1940s-70s." She received her M.A. in art history from Columbia University and her B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She contributes art criticism to Art Nexus.
Rachel Middleman
Aram Moshayedi
	Aram Moshayedi received his BA in art history/theory/criticism from the University of California, San Diego in 2004 and MA in art history from the University of Southern California in 2007, where he is currently enrolled as a doctoral student. He is also a curator at the nonprofit exhibition space LAXART in Los Angeles and has published widely in the field of contemporary art with recent contributions appearing in Art in America, Art Lies, Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture, and Art Papers. Now in his fourth year of graduate study at USC, his dissertation research is focused on the formation of alternative and artist-run exhibition spaces in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s.
Elizabeth Murphy
	Elizabeth received her B.A. in Art History from Bard College in 2005. Her primary interest is in Contemporary Native American and Chicano art, with a focus on cross-cultural representations and appropriation. She has worked on traditional New Mexican "folkart", lowrider art, and other non-art art practices. Before starting at USC she was the co-founder and director of an alternative, collective art space (A.D. Collective) in Santa Fe, NM.
Linda Nolan
	Linda Ann Nolan’s primary specialization is early modern Italian sculpture and secondary specialization is classical Roman sculpture. Her research interests include art restoration, viewer reception, history of collections, and early modern Italian prints and guidebooks. She has presented at a number of graduate symposia and professional conferences, including those held at Bryn Mawr College, Harvard University, and by the Archaeological Institute of America. Linda participated in the American Academy in Rome’s summer archaeology program excavating in the Roman Forum, and prior to that excavated at Pompeii with the University of Rome. Past internships include ones with art conservation centers in Chicago and Lugano, Switzerland. Linda held positions for several years in the Getty Research Institute’s Scholars Program and in the Museum Education Department at the J. Paul Getty Museum. During the 2005-2006 academic year, Linda received the Borchard Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship. During the 2006-2008 academic years, Linda will be in residence at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome conducting research for her dissertation, "Tactile Reception of Sculpture in Early Modern Rome," with the assistance of a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Fellowship at Foreign Institutions. In January 2007, Linda will present a paper, "Face the Truth: the Bocca della Verità," at the Archaeological Institute of America’s Annual Conference.
Jennifer Reynolds
	Jennifer Reynolds is a second year graduate student. Her work focuses on artistic interventions in charged public spaces, specifically those that have undergone redefinition due to historical events, such as the Berlin Wall. Her recent research turns to artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark and Allan Kaprow, and their artistic practices at the Berlin Wall in the 1970s. Her interest in the anarchitect Gordon Matta-Clark stems from her participation in organizing a symposium for the Getty Research Institute in 2006 and continues to the present with a recent panel discussion at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, in which she put forth potential readings of Matta-Clark's "Made in America" in light of recent archival research. After spending the summer working at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the Online Education Department, Jennifer is currently researching the visual cultures of Internet Art and the challenges of inserting an art historical lens on such an ephemeral and temporal medium. Before coming to USC, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in Art History and Film Studies from U.C. Berkeley and spent a year in Berlin as a participant in the Congress-Bundestag Young Professionals Exchange Program.
Virginia Solomon
	Virginia Solomon is a fourth year Ph.D. student specializing in modern and contemporary art, culture, and politics. She currently is working on a dissertation that considers the cultural politics of Canadian artist group General Idea, in the context of an expanded and evolving conversation concerning the relationship between art and politics. Other interests include feminist theory, cultural studies and visual studies. Virginia was a Helena Rubenstein fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program for the 2007/2008 academic year. She graduated from Stanford University in 2004, and after graduation worked as a gallery assistant and studio manager in San Francisco.
Kristine Tanton
	Kristine advanced to doctoral candidacy in August 2008. Her research focuses on Romanesque sculpture and its placement within architectural space. She is currently working on her dissertation, “The Marking of Monastic Space: Inscribed Language on Romanesque Capitals,” which investigates the prevalence of inscriptions on historiated capitals in monastic churches along the pilgrimage route in France during the twelfth century. She will spend the Spring 2009 semester in France conducting field and archive research with the help of a USC McClelland Fellowship. She served as a session chair at the CMRS Ahmanson Conference, “The Foundations of Medieval Monasticism” held at UCLA in January 2008. In the summer of 2007 she delivered a paper on the inscribed cloister capitals at Moissac at a joint seminar of UCLA, Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, and the Institut für Mittelalterforschung held at the University of Vienna. She served as co-chair for the 2007 USC Graduate Student Symposium, “A Useful Thing? Shifting Values, Uses and Interpretations of Art.” She also presented a paper on the pavement labyrinth of Amiens Cathedral at the 2006 USC Graduate Student Symposium. Kristine received her BFA from Parsons School of Design and worked as an art director in publishing and multimedia before arriving at USC. She received her M.A. in art history from USC in May 2007.
Amy Von Lintel
	Amy is in her sixth year of the Ph.D. program. Her dissertation examines the publishing genre of the illustrated art history survey in nineteenth-century Britain and France. It considers how these books, in their increasingly compact and affordable formats, made art history education available to a general public. In 2007, she received a fellowship from the Council for European Studies for dissertation research in Europe. She was named as a visiting scholar at the Yale Center for British Art for Summer 2009, and she received a finishing fellowship from the American Association of University Women for 2009-10. She has presented papers at various professional conferences, including the CAA annual meeting, the International Association of Word and Image Studies tri-annual meeting, and the North American Victorian Studies Association annual meeting. Her article "La Lithographie originale en couleurs: Influential Treatise and Objet d'art" was published in the Rutgers Art Review in 2006. She received her MA in art history from Southern Methodist University in 2003 and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with BA degrees in art history and French from the University of Kansas in 2001.
Candace Weddle
	Candace Weddle is carrying out field research for her dissertation “Making sense of emperor worship: The sensory experience of cult in Asia Minor.” Her interest is in determining how the sights, sounds, smells, and other sensory elements produced in the worship of the Roman imperial cult in four cities of Asia Minor (Ephesus, Laodicea, Aphrodisias and Sardis) in the 1st-4th centuries AD may have influenced later Christian reactions to the cult sites and images. She is currently residing in Istanbul where she is a residential fellow at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations. She also holds a Fulbright grant.

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