Holly Chen
M.A., Art History and Archaeology, Washington University in St. Louis
Holly Chen earned a B.A. in Art History from Case Western Reserve University in 2017, as well as, recently graduating with an M.A. in Art History and Archaeology from Washington University in St. Louis in 2019. She specializes in studying cross-cultural encounters in Early Modern art focusing specifically on Sino-European exchanges during the Ming and Qing Dynasties.
Chelsea Dacus
Ph.D. Student, Art History, Rice University
Chelsea Dacus is a Ph.D. student on the Museum Professionals track at Rice University. She earned her BA in Art History from Mt. Holyoke College and her MA in Art History with a specialty in Maya Art from Southern Methodist University. She is also Assistant Curator of The Glassell Collections, African, Oceanic, Pre-Columbian, and Antiquities at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her dissertation research focuses on the place of metalwork in the visual culture of the Tiwanaku of Bolivia.
Laura Grotjan
Ph.D. Student, Art History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Laura Grotjan is a Ph.D. student in art history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses mainly on Midwestern vernacular architecture, the history of agricultural buildings, and the illustration of domesticated animals. She is interested in issues of obsolescence and preservation, and her M.A. thesis explores how these topics relate to agricultural landscapes. In addition to an M.A. in art history from UW-Madison, Laura holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UW-Platteville and is a practicing artist who works primarily in oil paint.
Anna Orton-Hatzis
Ph.D. Student, Art History, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Anna is a second-year Ph.D. student in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York where specializes in European art of the nineteenth century. Prior, she completed her studies in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, specializing in Art History, at the University of Chicago where wrote on artist Eugène Fromentin and his approach to orientalist painting. She graduated from McGill University in 2015 with a bachelor’s in joint honors Art History and Anthropology. At McGill, Anna completed two honors theses, the first on repatriation policies in Canada and the second on the Scottish potter Emma Gillies, a project in conjunction with an exhibition at the University of Edinburgh.
Emily Kamen
M.A. Student, Art History, Williams College
Emily Perlmutter Kamen is an M.A. student at the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art, where she studies art and visual culture of North America and Europe with interests in environmental history, history of science, and animal studies. She earned a B.A. from Princeton University in art history, with a minor in environmental studies. She is a teaching assistant at Williams College and works at the Williams College Museum of Art. In addition to her work in Williamstown, she co-develops and teaches experiential education courses at the intersection of art history, environmental thought, and landscape history for high school students.
Courtney Kezlarian
M.A. Candidate, Arts Administration and Public Affairs, Indiana University
Courtney Kezlarian is a Masters candidate at Indiana University – Bloomington’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. She is studying for her Masters in Arts Administration and a Masters in Public Affairs. She attended New York University for her undergraduate degree in art history and museum studies. Her research in art history academia ranges from 17th Century Dutch still life painting to cultural heritage disputes between governments and institutions. Her upcoming research projects focus on the plausibility of implementing Native American and First Nations material culture centers in midsize American cities.
Leeseul Kwon
M.A. Student, Art History, Seoul National University
Leeseul Kwon is a second-year M.A. student at Seoul National University, South Korea, where she received her B.A. in Art History and in Aesthetics, and B.F.A. in Media Art. Her interest has been mainly within a range of early modern European art, especially concerned with the ambiguous intersection of the history of science and technology, public taste, and spatial installations throughout the visual culture; from anatomy theaters to cabinets of curiosities. Her recent research focused on the complexed usage of images and psychoactive drugs in a confined space in the Central Asian Buddhist rituals.
Corey Ratch
Ph.D. Candidate, Art History, Columbia University
Corey Ratch is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Columbia University specializing in interwar French and German art and photography. His dissertation addresses the impact of images of slaughtered animals, and how as production increased throughout the twentieth century, the slaughterhouse became increasingly removed from public view. This history in no small part helped pave the way for the contemporary factory farm and the current ecological crisis. His work is motivated largely by critical animal studies, posthumanism, and biosemiotics, focusing on depictions of nonhuman animals in art, how discourses of animality intersect with race, gender, and class, and how we are affected by images of violence and dismemberment.
Deirdre M. Smith
Ph.D. Candidate, Art History, University of Texas at Austin
Deirdre M. Smith is a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Texas at Austin. She researches modern and contemporary art, primarily in the Balkan region and former Yugoslavia. Her dissertation is a micro-history of Zagreb, Croatia during the socialist period focused on themes of art, labor, temporality, and photography. Ms. Smith is a recipient this year of an Association for Slavic East European & Eurasian Studies Dissertation Research Grant. She holds a master’s degree from George Washington University where she wrote a thesis on Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings.
Taylor Van Doorne
Ph.D. Student, History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara
Taylor Van Doorne is a Ph.D. student and Regents Fellow at University of California, Santa Barbara where she specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European architecture. Her research explores the intersection of public space, monuments, ephemerality, and popular uprisings in French architectural history. Her dissertation project examines the history of the colossal plaster elephant that had been a prototype for an unbuilt Napoleonic bronze fountain, which stood on the Place de la Bastille in Paris from 1813 to 1846. This project also considers the broader political function of the ephemeral monument in the emerging modern French state. In 2016, Taylor received her M.A. in Art and Architectural History from Tufts University. She completed her B.A. at Mills College in 2014 with a double major in Art History and English.
Eli S. Zadeh
Ph.D. Candidate, Art History and Criticism, State University of New York, Stony Brook
Eli S. Zadeh is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Criticism at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, working on the imbrications of sexuality and power in the late twentieth-century American art, and their social and political underpinnings in queer theories. Areas of particular research and pedagogical interest include postmodern art of the pictures generation, neo-expressionism, and video art in the 1970s and ’80s. More theoretical aspects of his work examine issues around the visual and performative expressions of biopower, agency, and control.