Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Twentieth Century
Dissertations in Progress by Subject, 2019

Show completed dissertations

Alvarez, Andrea, “The Art and Pedagogy of Josef Albers” (Virginia Commonwealth University, M. Lindauer)

An, Jamin, “Constructing Artist Identities: Henry Geldzahler at the Intersection of Artistic Need and Artistic Celebrity” (UCLA, M. Kwon)

Anderson Kramer, Cortney, “Not Just Visionary: Individualism, self-expression, and the grassroots concrete sculpture garden” (University of Wisconsin Madison, A. Martin)

Bacon, Alex, Opaque Surfaces and Lived Illusions: Minimalism and the Status of Painting in the 1960s” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Barouti, Tina. “A Critical Chronology: The National Institute of Fine Arts in Tétouan from 1912 to the Age of Mohammed VI,” (Boston University, C. Becker)

Boone, Jobyl, “Christo and Jean-Claude in the United States, 1964-2005” (University of Delaware, J. Horton)

Borowitz, Maggie, “Caught by Surprise: Intimacy and Feminist Politics in the work of Magali Lara” (University of Chicago, M. Sullivan)

Bralower, Alyssa R. "Ellen Auerbach’s Transnational Attachments: Photography, Gender, and the Grey Zones of Modernity" (UIUC, K. Romberg)

Brandi, Goddard, “‘Humble Hands in Humble Homes’: Cottage-Industry Textiles, Women’s Labour, and Craft Co-operative Societies in Ireland, 1935-1958” (University of Alberta, J. Greer)

Bratton, Lyndsay, “The Artěl Cooperative (1908–1934): Crafting Czech Modernity” (University of Maryland, College Park, S. Mansbach)

Burton, Johanna, “The Content of Context: Appropriation in American Art of the 1980s” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Cerejido, Elizabeth, “Where Is Cuban American Art? Artistic Production, Identity Formation and Cultural Politics from the 1980s to the Present” (University of Florida, K. Cabañas and M. Stanfield-Mazzi)

Chaim, Jordan Karney, "Do It Yourselves: Alternative Spaces and the Rise of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, 1970-1990" (Boston University, G. Williams)

Colkitt, Laura, “In Between Relations: Liliana Porter’s Art” (University of Florida, K. Cabañas)

Converse, Grace, “Art, Theosophy, and the Making of Occult California, 1890-1945” (University of Southern California, A. Ogata)

Cooke, Erica, “The Dia Art Foundation: The Formation of Site, Address and Audience” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Coudrelle, Maeve, "The Imprint of Pan-Americanism: Chilean Graphic Biennials, 1963-1970" (Temple University, M.Alvarez)

Crawford, Jack, “Flamboyant Abundance: Performing Queer Maximalism 1960-1990” (CUNY-Graduate Center, C. Bishop)

Crockett, Vivian, "'The Skin of All': The Racial Politics of an Anthropophagic Return in Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape" (Columbia University, K. Jones)

Croggon, Nicholas, "Reconstructing the Utopian Moment: Experimental Video Practices in the 1970s" (Columbia University, B. Joseph)

Davies, Jon, "The Fountain: Art, Sex and Queer Pedagogy in San Francisco, 1945–1995" (Stanford University, R. Meyer)

DeFeo, Janine, “Food, Eating, and the Social Body in American Art, 1962-1983” (CUNY-Graduate Center, S. Wilson)

Denison, James, "Their America: Race, Place, the Stieglitz Circle, and the Historiography of Modern American Art" (University of Michigan, R. Zurier)

Di Cicco, Rachel, “The Body, the Kosmos, and the Other: The Cosmopolitan Imagination of Erika Giovanna Klien” (University of Pittsburgh, B. McCloskey)

DiBenedetto, Erica, “Drawing from Architecture: The Conceptual Methods of Sol LeWitt's Art, 1965–1980” (Princeton, B. Doherty and H. Foster)

Dorofeeva, Maria. "Fantasizing Manhood: Art and Sexual Politics in Spain, 1898-1939." (UIUC, O. Vazquez)

Dupecher, Natalie, “Language, Body, World: The Art of Hans Bellmer” (Princeton, Doherty)

Encarnacion, Samantha Karam, “Ways of Being, Ways of Knowing: Dorothea Tanning’s Posthumanist Representations” (Virginia Commonwealth University, K. Chapman)

Fiske, Courtney, "Rethinking Post-Minimalism: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Cut c. 1970" (Columbia University, B. Joseph)

Fitch, Nicholas, “'Non hanno capito niente': Figuration and Narrative in the Post-1968 Work of Clorindo Testa" (Columbia University, B. Joseph)

Floyd, Tiffany, "Dreams of Ancient Times: Antiquity, Archaeology, and the Struggle for Contemporaneity in Modern Iraqi Art" (Columbia University, Z. Bahrani and A. Alberro)

Gaglia, Nicole Y., “Visualizing Bodies: Public Health and the Medicalized Every day in Modern Japan” (Duke University, G. Weisenfeld)

Germán, Elisa, "The Creative 'State': The Calcografía Nacional and its Impact on Printmaking in Madrid after the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1959" (Boston University, G. Williams)

Ginsberg, Mary Ann: "The Revolution Before the Revolution: The Art Bureau of Nadezhda Dobychina, 1912-1919" (University of Maryland, College Park, S. Mansbach)

Goldschmidt, Michal, “Interwar Explorations of Empire and British Identity: Modernism in Mandate Palestine.” (Brown University, C. Martin)

Gordon-Fogelson, Robert, "Total Integration: Design, Business, and Society in the United States, 1935–1975" (University of Southern California, A. Ogata)

Graversen, Hanne, "Interchanges: Construction of the U.S. Interstate Highway System and Artistic Practice, 1956-1984" (University of Chicago, C. Mehring; Northwestern University, R. Zorach)

Green, Christopher, “Masked Moderns: Northwest Coast Native Art Beyond Revival” (CUNY-Graduate Center, D. Joselit)

Green, Sara, “Lettrism's "aesthetic element" (Princeton, B. Doherty)

Gustin, Kelsey, “Picturing Reform: The Visual Culture of the Progressive Era in New York City, 1890-1920” (Boston University, P. Hills)

Haines, Chelsea, “Staging the Modern, Building the Nation: Israeli Exhibitions, 1948-1965” (CUNY-Graduate Center, R. Golan)

Henriksen, Niels, "Asger Jorn and the Classification of Disfiguration, 1948–1965" (Princeton University, H. Foster)

Henry, Joseph, “The Production Line of Feeling: Expressionism, Sachlichkeit, and Die Brücke” (CUNY-Graduate Center, R. Golan)

Heuer, Megan, “A New Realism: Fernand Léger 1918-1931” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Hughes, Amy, “Refracted Memory: Trauma and Affective Politics in Stanislav Libenský’s and Jaroslava Brychtová’s Glass Sculptures in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1968-1980” (University of Wisconsin-Madison, J. Casid)

Jacobus-Parker, Frances, “The Art of Vija Celmins” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Johal, Rattanamol Singh, "Dissolving Margins: Indian art in the Globalized 1990s" (Columbia University, A. Alberro)

Johnson, Josie “Before the Iron Curtain: Margaret Bourke-White’s Early Soviet Photgraphs” (Brown University, D. Nickel)

Kacsor, Adri, “Migrant Aesthetics: Hungarian Artists In the Service of Soviet Internationalism, 1919-1956 ” (Northwestern University, C. Kiaer)

Kahng, Hannah, “This Film Which Is Not One: Intersections of Expanded Cinema and Feminism, 1970-1979” (UCLA, G. Baker)

Katzin, Jeffrey, "Light and Magic: Alvin Langdon Coburn and the Potential of Abstract Photography" (University of Pennsylvania, M. Leja)

Khandelwal, Vishal, "Belonging Without Aligning: India and the Ethics of Design, 1955-1985" (University of Michigan, C. Zimmerman)

Kim, Jeewon, "Decolonizing the Brush: The Problematics of "Japanese Color" in Modern Korean Painting" (Columbia University, J. Reynolds)

Kirmizi, Defne,” Building Artistic Autonomy in Turkey: Conceptual Strategies and Group Exhibitions between 1974 and 1994” (Boston University, G. Williams)

Kleinman, Sarah Edith, "The Curatorial Practice and Exhibitions of Kynaston McShine, 1966-1971"(Virginia Commonwealth University, M. Lindauer)

Koller, Denise, “Painting as “Construction”: Compositional Tectonics and Space in the Work of Ferdinand Hodler, 1889-1918” (Princeton, B. Doherty)

Landau, Jessica, "Critical Habitat: Picturing Conservation, Extinction, and the American Animal in the Long Twentieth Century," (UIUC, T. Weissman)

Lathrop, Perrin, “A Sublime Art: Akinola Lasekan and Colonial Modernism in Nigeria” (Princeton, C. Okeke-Agulu)

Law, Jessica, “Modernism Laid Bare: Mediation and Measurement, 1911-1972” (The University of British Columbia, T. Smith)

Lima, Álvaro Luís, "Art in Mozambique at the End of Socialism" (Columbia University, Z. Strother)

Lin, Nancy, “Making Spaces: Chinese Site-based Art in the 1990s” (University of Chicago, H. Wu)

Llorens, Natasha Marie, "Imagining Violence, Imagining the Nation: Algerian National Cinema between 1965 and 1979" (Columbia University, A. Alberro)

Lo, Siwin, “Derivations: Appropriating Abstraction before and after Pictures; 1965-2015 “(CUNY-Graduate Center, D. Joselit)

London, Alan, “Endorsing “Reality”: Three Mid-Twentieth Century Responses to a Crisis in Depictive American Painting” (University of Pittsburgh, K. Savage)

Maier, Angelica J., "Toxic Matter: American Sculpture, Materials Science and Cultural Fear, 1962-1979" (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, J. Blocker)

Matyczyk, Ewa, “Public Transformations: Intervention, Memory, and Community in Warsaw, 1970-2010” (Boston University, G. Williams)

McGinnis Flanagan, Julie, “Remapping the Spaces for American Art: John Singer Sargent, Modernism and the Grand Central Art Galleries, 1922-1939” (Temple University, E. Pauwels; G. Silk)

McManus, William, “When we made movies just to make them': Warhol's films and the surface of the 1960s” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Metzger, Cyle, "Deep Cuts: Transgender History in American Art since World War II" (Stanford University, R. Meyer)

Miller, Mark Parker, “Claiming and Denying Sophistication: Grant Wood’s Art and Responses to It, 1930-1942” (University of Delaware, J. Hill)

Mohammadi, Banafsheh, “Images of the Experiential: the Petroleum Roots of Architectural Phenomenology and the Phenomenology of Religion, 1945-1967” (University of Alberta, J. Greer)

Mukhopadhyay, Sayantan, “Of Hearth and Home: Indian Contemporary Art in the 1980s and 1990s” (UCLA, S. Mathur)

Murphy, Benjamin, “Fieldwork: Problems of Observation in Latin American Video” (Princeton, I. Small)

Naessens, Luke, “Time in Process: Primitivism and Deep Histories in American Art, 1969–1984” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Nelson-Dusek, Colin, “Émile-Antoine Bourdelle and the Midi: French Sculpture and Regional Identity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” (University of Delaware, N. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer)

Nikolic, Misa, “Marxist Cultural Theory and Caricature: Eduard Fuchs and the Dialectical Image” (University of Alberta, D. Sweeney)

Nordyke, Marisa Gomez, “Fabricating the American Dream: Stressed-Skin Technology and the American Home, 1930-1965” (University of Wisconsin-Madison, A. Andrzejewski)

North, Meredith, “Industrial Impulses and Serial Systems: The Art of Thomas Bayrle, Charlotte Posenenske, and Peter Roehr in Frankfurt am Main, 1962-1968” (University of Pittsburgh, B. McCloskey)

O’Brien, Jeffrey, “The Right to be Seen: Archiving Absence in Post-Civil War Lebanon” (The University of British Columbia, J. O’Brian)

Ottenhausen, Clemens, “Documenta’s Elective Affinities: Modern Art’s Comeback in Postwar Germany” (University of Florida, K. Cabañas)

Park, Haeyun, “Electronic Esperanto: Trans-Pacific Development of Video Art, 1969-1991” (CUNY-Graduate Center, D. Joselit)

Peacock, Daniel, “'Living Pictures': Pictorialist Photography and the Illustration of Fiction” (Princeton, A. McCauley)

Perthes, William, "Robert Motherwell and French Symbolist Poetry" (Temple University, G. Silk)

Pires, Leah, "Finesse: Louise Lawler's Pictures" (Columbia University, A. Alberro)

Poor, Kristin, “The Sculptural Prop and the Activation of the Object, 1960–1979” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Praepipatmongkol, Chanon Kenji, “Postwar Abstraction and Practices of Mediation: Fernando Zóbel and Tang Chang” (University of Michigan, J. Kee)

Quick, Gabriel, “The Party’s Over: Street Art and Protest in 1980s New York” (Boston University, G. Williams)

Reineck, Ryan, “Our Decorative Scheme”: Abstraction and Subversion in the Designs of the Omega Workshops, 1913-1919” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Reubendale, Vanessa. "Please Hold While I Connect You: Intermedia Art, Telecommunications Work, and the Broadcast Network, 1947-77" (University of Minnesota, J. Blocker)

Robinson, Christine, “Pictures and Photographs: Sarah Charlesworth and Appropriation, 1977–2013” (UCLA, G. Baker)

Robles Sepúlveda, Constanza, “Pan Americanism and Hispanism in World Fairs: 1901-1939” (Boston University, A. Reyes)

Rottman, Zachary, “A Cinematic Atopia: Robert Smithson and the Radical Aspiration” (UCLA, G. Baker)

Ryan, Caitlin, “Documents of Social Life: Photography in Popular Front France” (Princeton, A. McCauley)

Sarathy, Jennifer, “Expanded Cartographies: Postwar British Land Art 1966-79” (CUNY-Graduate Center, S. Wilson)

Schillinger, Jakob, “The Improvement of Contemporary Art: From Information Aesthetics to Post-Conceptual Painting” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Schriber, Abbe, "For a Politics of Obscurity: David Hammons and Black Experimentalism, 1974-1989” (Columbia University, K. Jones)

Schwaller, William, "A Transnational Arte de Sistemas: The Centro de Arte y Comunicación in Argentina and Abroad, 1968-1983" (Temple University, M. Alvarez)

Shabtay Filip, Talia, “Machine-Eyed Modern: Art, Science, and Visual Experience in Early Cold War America” (Northwestern University, H. Feldman)

Smith, Joshua M., “Inglorious Memories: Envisioning the Franco-Prussian War in Modern France” (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, D. Sherman)

Stanton, Miriam Ashkin, “Gravitational Imagination: Picturing Suspension from Eadweard Muybridge to the Space Age” (University of Pennsylvania, A. Dombrowski)

Stobaugh, Nathan, “New Media, New Masses: VALIE EXPORT’s Arts of Communication” (Princeton, B. Doherty)

Strupp, Brittany, "Between Impressionism and Realism: The Early Career of Robert Henri" (Temple University, E. Pauwels)

Tang, Kelly, “The Fantastic Theater of Twentieth Century Chinese Art” (Duke University, S. Abe)

Taylor, Phil, "Raoul Ubac's Photographic Surrealism" (Princeton, A. McCauley)

Tung, Stephanie, “Truth in Translation: Discourses of Photography in Republican Era China” (Princeton, J. Silbergeld)

Valyi-Nagy, Zsofi, “Vera Molnar’s Programmed Abstraction: Computer Graphics and Geometric Abstract Art in Postwar Europe” (University of Chicago, C. Mehring)

Vickery, Jo, “Ethnographic Re-Telling: The Art of Lothar Baumgarten” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Wade, Isabel Frampton, "Glossy Buildings, Planned Images: Architectural Photography across Contested Spaces in Los Angeles, 1940-1980" (University of Southern California, V. Schwartz)

Waldow, Jennie, "Disappearing Acts: Allen Ruppersberg's Ephemeral Impulse" (Stanford University, R. Meyer and P. Lee)

Werier, Leah, “’The Shop Window Quality of Things:’ The Shop Window and the Staging of Gender, Vision and Desire" (Columbia University, A. Alberro)

Whitham, Hilary R. "From Dada to Decolonization: Tristan Tzara and the Idea of Africa" (University of Pennsylvania, M. Leja and C. Poggi)

Whitworth, Christian, "Lettrism's Language Loss and the Disarticulation of the Avant-Garde" (Stanford University, P. Levi)

Witkowski, Jacqueline, “Disappearing Threads: Art, Text, and Textile during Dictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile” (The University of British Columbia, T. Smith)

Wyma, Chloe, “Labor and Pleasure in the Art of the Kirstein Circle, 1932-1956” (CUNY-Graduate Center, M. Lobel)

Yohalem, Hannah, “Movement and Arrest: Jasper Johns, 1954-1968” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Zhang, Michael, “The Business of Art: Art, Capital, and Identity in Late-Apartheid South Africa” (Princeton, C. Okeke-Agulu and A. Arabindan-Kesson)

Zhao, Yechen, "Lost and Found: Discovering Photography in 1970s America" (Stanford University, A. Nemerov)

Zimmerman, Devon, "A World for All and None: De Stijl, Modernism, and the Decorative Arts" (University of Maryland, College Park, S. Mansbach)