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

Art of the United States
Dissertations in Progress by Subject, 2006

Show completed dissertations

Abbott, Janet, "The Barnett Aden Gallery: A Home for Diversity in a Segregated City" (Penn State, J. Robinson)

Anderson, Sherman Reed, "An Epic of the American Farm: James Ormsbee Chapin and the Marvin Paintings" (Kansas, C. Eldredge)

Anderson, Virginia, "'A State of Anxious Uncertainty': The Critical Reception of Jasper Johns" (Boston, C. Jones)

Applegate, Heidi, "Staging Modernism at the 1915 San Francisco World's Fair" (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

Ashe, Lisa Frye, "Scale, Size, and the Spaces of American Painting, 1948–1968" (Virginia, H. Singerman)

Atkins, Ashley, "Winslow Homer and Aestheticism in the United States" (Rutgers, W. Bellion)

Backer, Matthew, "Building a Brave New World: The Future Made Present at Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition, 1933–34" (Indiana, Bloomington, S. Burns)

Bailly, Austen Barron, "Painting the American Historical Epic: Thomas Hart Benton and Race, 1919–36" (UC Santa Barbara, E. Bruce Robertson)

Ball, Jeffrey, "The Missouri State Capitol: Architecture, Mural Painting, and Sculptural Decoration" (Missouri, O. Overby)

Barrett, Ross, "Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Visual Culture" (Boston, P. Hills)

Beggs, Margo, "Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908): Fame, Photography, and the American Sculptress" (Toronto, M. Gotlieb, M. Cheetham, E. Legge)

Bilbo, Rebecca, "The Art Academy of Cincinnati: A Social, Cultural and Institutional History" (Indiana, Bloomington, S. Burns)

Boone, Jobyl, "The Spectacle in the Art of the United States after 1967" (University of Delaware, A. Gibson)

Brooks, Leronn, "An Art of Resistance: The Legacy of Hale Woodruff (1900–80)" (CUNY, K. Manthorne)

Buckner, Cindy, "The Etching Revival in Late Nineteenth-Century America and Its Role in Aesthetic Education" (CUNY, S. Webster)

Burgess, Lana A., "Advancing American Art: Survival of an Idea" (FSU, K. Bearor)

Campbell, Kathryn, "Imaging Russia during the Cold War: Photographs in Life Magazine, 1945–1962" (Virginia Commonwealth, R. Hobbs)

Cantor, Karen, "The Life and Work of Boris Artzybasheff" (SUNY Stony Brook, M. Bogart)

Caro, Julie Levin, "The Early Career of Allan Rohan Crite (1930–50)" (UT Austin, L. Henderson, C. Smith)

Chung, Nogin, "Picturing American Women in the Postwar Period" (Minnesota, K. A. Marling)

Clancy, Jonathan, "Transcendentalism and the Crisis of Self in American Art and Culture, 1840–1930" (CUNY, K. Manthorne)

Costello, Eileen Elizabeth, "Between the Easel and the Mural: The Dissolution of Abstract Expressionist Painting into the Realm of Architecture" (UT Austin, R. Shiff)

Coyle, Heather Campbell, "Having Fun with Art: Pranks, Performances, and Parody in American Art Schools, 1890–1915" (Delaware, M. Leja, M. Werth)

Curtiss, Kimberly, "Painting Skin: The Construction of Racial Identity through Representations of American Indians in Jacksonian America, ca. 1828–1848" (Rutgers, W. Bellion)

Dasch, Rowena Houghton, "'Now Exhibiting': Charles Bird King's Picture Gallery, Fashioning Taste and Nation 1824–1861" (UT Austin, S. Rather)

De Armendi, Nicole, "Shifting Perception: Labyrinths and the Rise of Phenomenology in American Art of the 1960s and 1970s" (Virginia Commonwealth, R. Hobbs)

Diaz, Eva, "Chance and Design: Experimental Art at Black Mountain College" (Princeton, H. Foster)

Dolan, Julia, "'I Will Take You into the Heart of Modern Industry': Lewis Hine's Photographic Interpretation of the Machine Age" (Boston, K. Sichel)

Dooley, Michael C., "Citizen Bird: American Ornithological Art of the Progressive Era and the Beginnings of the Bird Conservation Movement" (Iowa, J. Kinsey)

Dossin, Catherine Julie Marie, "'I Like America and America Likes Me': Artistic Exchanges between France, Germany and the United States, 1945–89" (UT Austin, R. Shiff, K. Arens)

Elliott, Katherine L., "Constructing National Identity: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Representations of First Contacts" (Iowa, J. Kinsey)

Ellis, Amy, "'Not a Mere Leaf-Painter': Thomas Cole and the Figure" (Columbia, J. Crary, E. Hutchinson)

Evans, Yates, "Doors and Windows: Eastern Philosophy and Western Aesthetics in the Art of Ray Johnson" (Virginia Commonwealth, R. Hobbs)

Faletti, Rina Cathleen, "Water, Architecture and Landscape in California and the American West" (UT Austin, M. Charlesworth, R. Shiff)

Fleming, Tuliza, "Thomas Satterwhite Noble: Reconstructed Rebel" (Maryland, S. Promey)

Foutch, Ellery, "Arresting Beauty: Perfectionism in Peale's Butterflies, Sandow's Body, and Blaschka's Flowers" (Pennsylvania, M. Leja)

George, Angela, "'The Old New World': Unearthing Mesoamerican Antiquity in the Art and Culture of the United States, 1839–1893" (Maryland, S. Promey)

Gephart, Emily, "Symbolism, Modernism and the Work of Arthur B. Davies" (MIT, C. Jones)

Gerhold, Emily, "American Beauties: The Breast in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture" (Virginia Commonwealth, E. Garberson)

Gilbert, Christopher, "American Art and Language during the Period of the Fox (1974–76)" (Virginia Commonwealth, R. Hobbs)

Glahn, Philip, "Estrangement and Politicization: Bertolt Brecht and Postwar American Art" (CUNY, R. Golan)

Glenn, Kimberly L., "Charles Dawson and the Chicago Renaissance: Art, Racial Pride, and Identity" (Iowa, B. Mooney)

Glesmann, Amanda, "The Artistic House: Photographing Domestic Space in Late Nineteenth-Century America" (Stanford, B. Wolf)

Glick, Paula F., "Paul Sample: Life and Career" (Columbia, J. Beck)

Green, Midori, "Sec's Appeal: The Secretary in American Popular Culture, 1900–64" (University of Minnesota, K. Solomonson)

Green, Robin Cowie, "'A Certain Slant of Light': Exhilaration, Oppression, and the Forces of Sunlight in American Impressionism" (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Greene, Nikki, "The Rhythm of Glue, Grease and Grime: Body and Indexicality in the Works of Romare Bearden, David Hammons and Renée Stout" (Delaware, A. Gibson)

Greenhalgh, Adam, "Risky Business: Change and Contingency in American Art, 1876–1907" (Maryland, F. Kelly)

Greenhill, Jennifer A., "'The Plague of Jocularity': Contesting Humor in American Art and Culture, 1863–93" (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Guglielmo, Antoniette M., "Work-Bench of American Taste: Richard F. Bach, Industrial Art Exhibitions, and Consumerism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Interwar Years" (UC Santa Barbara, E. Bruce Robertson)

Hack, Brian, "Lorado Taft, George Grey Barnard and the Promise of Monumental Symbolist Sculpture in Early Twentieth-Century America" (CUNY, S. Webster)

Hagood, Martha, "Representing the Truth: Realism, Sensationalism, and the Progressive Era Picture Press, 1902–1913" (Delaware, B. Herman)

Hatch, Kevin, "Looking for Bruce Conner: Assemblage, Films, Drawings, 1957–67" (Princeton, H. Foster)

Haxall, Daniel, "Politics, Form, and Identity in Abstract Expressionist Collage" (Penn State, S. Rich)

Hellstein, Valerie, "Abstract Expressionism and the Possibility of Transcendence" (SUNY Stony Brook, M. Bogart)

Heyrman, Joy, "Signature Drawings: Collecting Artists' 'Autographs' in Antebellum America" (Maryland, S. Promey)

Huerta, Monica, "Is It Real?" (Michigan, R. Zurier)

Hyde, Kimberley, "Louis C. Tiffany and the Business of Art" (Case Western Reserve, H. Adams)

Ikegami, Hiroko, "1964: Robert Rauschenberg and the Beginnings of Globalization in Modern Art" (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Ikemoto, Wendy, "Double Vision: Pendant Painting in Antebellum America" (Harvard, J. Roberts)

Jensen, Kirsten M., "The 'American Salon': Cultural Ambition, American Art, and the Inter-State Industrial Expositions in Chicago, 1859–1893" (CUNY, S. Webster)

Jones, Penny, "Figural Trees: American Artists and Forest Debate in the Nineteenth Century" (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

Jordan, Guy, "The Aesthetics of Intoxication in Antebellum American Art and Culture" (Maryland, S. Promey)

Kaiserlian, Michelle, "Artistic Responses to The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in Great Britain and the United States, ca. 1900–40" (Indiana, Bloomington, M. Facos)

Kaps, Nanni, "Similarities of Form and Concept in American and German 19th-Century Landscape Painting" (Columbia, B. Novak)

Karpinskaia, Natalia, "Landscape Art and Landscape Attitudes in Russia and America" (Columbia, B. Novak)

Katz, Roberta Gray, "Mediated by Text: The Literary Paintings of Thomas Cole" (UIC, D. Sokol)

Kelly, Sarah, "Camera's Lens and Mind's Eye: Whistler and the Science of Art" (Columbia, D. Rosand)

Kiefer, Evelyn, "The Birth and Death of the American Dining Room: An Evolution from the Colonial Hall to Frank Lloyd Wright's Dining Rooms and Beyond" (Case Western Reserve, H. Adams)

King, Jennifier, "Michael Asher and the Art of Infrastructure: Space, Cities, Institutions" (Princeton, H. Foster)

Kjaer, Lise, "Awakening the Spiritual: James Turrell and Quaker Practice" (CUNY, H. Senie)

Knappe, Stephanie, "Land of Lincoln: The Sixteenth President in Interwar Culture and Collective Memory" (Kansas, C. Eldredge)

Knox, Page, "Scribner's Monthly/The Century: A Vehicle of Aesthetic Thought in Late-Nineteenth-Century America" (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

Kohn, Adrian Michael, "Seeing Los Angeles Minimalism 1958–72" (UT Austin, R. Shiff)

Kroiz, Lauren, "Modernizing 'A Grey Race': New Immigrants, New Media, and the Stieglitz Circle (1891–1924)" (MIT, C. Jones)

Kurtz, Amy, "Old Worlds and New: Edward Lamson Henry (1814–1919), Conservative Genre Painting" (Yale, J. Prown)

Lamuniere, Michelle, "The Social Museum at Harvard: Francis Greenwood Peabody and Early Twentieth-Century Social Reform Photography in Context" (Boston, K. Sichel)

Lasser, Ethan, "Figures in the Grain: The Stakes of Furniture in Anglo-America, 1660–1800" (Yale, E. Cooke Jr.)

Lawton, Saadia, "Representing the Representative: Visual Binaries of the Wedgwood Slave Medallion, 1787–1887" (Wisconsin, Madison, A. Andrzejewski)

Lee, Kee-Lee, "Sur Vampyr: Theresa Hak Kyang Cha and the Cultural Para-Sites of the Korean Diaspora" (UNC Chapel Hill, C. Mavor)

Loechle, Anne M., "Ye Intruders Beware: Masculinity, Vicarious Adventure and Fantastical Pirates in the Golden Age of Illustration and Beyond" (Indiana, Bloomington, S. Burns)

Longwell, Alicia, "John Graham and the Quest for an American Art in the 1920s and 1930s" (CUNY, K. Manthorne)

Madsen, Annelise, "Retro Spectacle: Allegory as Culture, Play, and Politics in American Art and Life, 1890–1917" (Stanford, W. Corn)

Mann, Crawford Alexander, Iii, "When in Rome: Italian Travel and the Pursuit of the Ideal Male Body in Antebellum American Art" (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Marley, Anna, "Rooms with a View: Landscape Representation in Early National Domestic Interiors" (Delaware, W. Bellion)

Mayer, Stephanie, "The Art of The Gift: Mount, Sully, Huntington, and the Antebellum Gift Book Industry" (Boston, P. Hills)

Mazow, Alissa Walls, "Plantae, Animalia, Fungi: Transformations of Natural History in Contemporary American Art" (Penn State. S. Rich)

McAtee, Cammie, "Form and Formalism in American Architecture in the 1950s and '60s" (Harvard, N. Levine)

McGuire, Heather, "John Baldessari: Blasted Allegories" (Virginia Commonwealth, R. Hobbs)

Michael, Vincent L., "Motives in Historic District Preservation: Community Control and Professional Practice" (UIC, R. Bruegmann)

Miller, Mark Parker, "Claiming and Denying Sophistication: Grant Wood's Art and Responses to It: 1930–1942" (Delaware, A. Gibson)

Miller, Sarah M., "Inventing 'Documentary' in American Photography, 1930–1945" (Chicago, J. Snyder)

Mocella Liakos, Barbaranne E., "The Civil War and Collective Memory: Remembering the American Conflict in Paintings and Prints, 1870–1900" (Iowa, J. Kinsey)

Moss, Dorothy, "Recasting the Copy: Original Paintings and Reproductions at the Dawn of American Mass Culture, ca. 1900" (Delaware, M. Leja, M. Werth)

Murphy, Jessica, "Portraiture and Feminine Identity in the Stieglitz Circle: Agnes Ernst Meyer, Katharine Rhoades, and Marion Beckett" (Delaware, M. Werth)

Murphy, Joni, "Coyote Tales: Stereotypes, Politics, and Humor in the Art of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith" (Kansas, D. Cateforis)

Naeem, Asma, "'The Imagery of the Ear': The Visual Culture of Sound and Sound Technologies in American Art, 1848–1948" (Maryland, S. Promey)

Napolitano, Laura Groves, "Growing Pains: Lilly Martin Spencer's Images of Children, 1845–1870" (Maryland, S. Promey)

Nelson, Andrea, "Reading Montage: The Photography Books of László Moholy-Nagy and Walker Evans" (Minnesota, J. Blocker)

Nowicki, Susan, "Montclair, New Jersey: The Development of a Suburban Town and Its Architecture" (CUNY, K. Murphy)

Osman, Michael, "Regulation in the Architecture of American Modernism, 1890–1920" (MIT, M. Jarzombek)

Peiffer, Prudence, "Routine Extremism: Ad Reinhardt and Modern Art" (Harvard, Y-A. Bois)

Pennisi, Meghan, "Dutch Flower Still-Life Painting in Middelburg, ca. 1600–20" (Northwestern, C. Swan)

Perry, Weena, "America in Ruins: Photography and the Making of National Meanings" (SUNY Stony Brook, M. Bogart)

Poor, Natasha, "Dirty Art: Transgressing Domesticity and the Body in 1950s United States Art" (CUNY, A. Chave)

Powers, Sarah, "Images of Tension: City and Country in the work of Charles Sheeler, Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton" (Delaware, A. Gibson, M. Leja)

Price, Justine Dana, "Critical Distinctions: Attitudes towards American Abstraction, 1936–52" (UT Austin, R. Shiff)

Price, Marshall, "John Ferren and the Development of Abstraction" (CUNY, K. Manthorne)

Pultz, Janet, "Christian Abrahamsen (1887–1983), Norwegian-American Portrait Painter" (Missouri, O. Overby)

Raab, Jennifer, "Frederic Church and the Culture of Detail: Memory, Forgetting, and Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America" (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Reynolds, Rebecca, "Preserving Her Nature: The Animal and Figurative Sculpture of Anna Hyatt Huntington" (Boston, P. Hills)

Reynolds, Rebecca L., "Sculpture Parks, Sculpture Gardens, and Site-Specific Practices in the U.S., 1965–1991" (Chicago, M. Ward)

Richards, Elizabeth, "Fabrics in Modern and Contemporary American Art: Unraveling Threads of Discourse" (Cornell, J. Bernstock)

Roberts, Ellen, "Japanese Art and the American Aesthetic Interior, 1870–1900" (Boston, P. Hills)

Roeder, Katherine, "Cultivating Dreamfulness: Fantasy, Longing, and Commodity Culture in the Work of Winsor McCay" (Delaware, M. Leja, M. Werth)

Roethke, Leigh, "A Passion for Spain: Españolismo in American Visual Culture" (Minnesota, K. A. Marling)

Rosenbaum, Sarah, "In the Public Domain: Public Art, Advanced Capitalism, and the Contemporary City" (Harvard, Y-A. Bois)

Ross, Zachary, "The Eclectic Ideal: Edwin Austin Abbey's Murals at the Pennsylvania State Capitol, Harrisburg" (CUNY, S. Webster)

Rottner, Nadja, "Claes Oldenburg, 1959–1966: The Violence of Sensation" (Columbia, J. Rajchman, R. Krauss, B. Joseph)

Rundquist, Leisa, "Firestorms and Conflagrations: The Inflamed Cosmology of Henry Darger" (UNC Chapel Hill, C. Mavor)

Sailor, Rachel M., "Meaningful Places: Nineteenth Century Photography and the Local Landscapes of the American West" (Iowa, J. Kinsey)

Samet, Jennifer, "Undercurrents: Figurative Painting in New York, 1960–80" (CUNY, P. Mainardi)

Samuel, Anne, "Rethinking Vision in the American Renaissance Murals of Edwin Howland Blashfield" (Delaware, M. Leja, M. Werth)

Scanlon, Patricia S., "'God-gifted girls': Women Illustrators, Gender, Class and Commerce in American Visual Culture, 1885–1925" (Indiana, Bloomington, S. Burns)

Sean, Rowe, "Figuring the Landscape: Western Monuments and the Contested Terrain of American National Nostalgia" (UC Irvine, C. Whiting)

Senf, Rebecca, "Intimate Places: Ansel Adams's Photographs in the American West and Southwest, 1916–1936" (Boston, K. Sichel)

Sherry, Karen, "Exposing the 'Natural' Woman: Female Bodies in American Visual Culture, 1785 to 1830" (Delaware, M. Leja)

Sivard, Susan, "The Volcano in European and American Art, 1770–1865" (Columbia, B. Novak)

Slifkin, Robert, "Philip Guston's 'Return to Figuration' and the Crisis in the Humanities" (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Smith, Jerry, "Auto-America: The Automobile and American Art, ca. 1900–1950" (Kansas, C. Eldredge)

Smith, Laura, "The Art of Horace Poolaw, Kiowa Photographer" (Indiana, Bloomington, S. Burns)

Snook, Sarah, "The Development of the American Art Market in Antebellum New York" (Columbia, D. Rosand)

Stamey, Emily, "Pop, Place, and Personal Identity in the Art of Roger Shimomura" (Kansas, D. Cateforis, C. Eldredge)

Steck, Stuart, "Veiling the Subject: Ellsworth Kelly and the Discourses of Modernism" (Boston, C. Jones)

Talbott, Jennifer, "Avis Mortis: Ornithology and Modern American Art" (Kansas, C. Eldredge)

Thrush, Nanette, "Tilting at History: Gothic Revival Tournaments in Early Victorian Great Britain and the Antebellum American South" (Indiana, Bloomington, S. Burns)

Toteva, Maia Todorova, "Language Use in Conceptual Art: Eastern European and North American Strategies" (UT Austin, R. Shiff)

Travis, Amber, "Theatres of War, Torture and Duress: Leon Golub's Mercenaries, Interrogations, and White Squads: 1979–87" (Northwestern, S. Eisenman)

Tuite, Diana, "Methods for Modernism: Arthur Wesley Dow Intersects the Stieglitz Circle" (Princeton, J. Wilmerding)

Ureña, Leslie, "Lewis Hine at Ellis Island: The Photography of Immigration and Race, 1904–1926" (Northwestern, S. Eisenman)

Van Horn, Jennifer, "The Object of Civility and the Art of Politeness in British America, 1740–1780" (Virginia, M. McInnis)

Vincenti, Marissa, "Our Spiritual Strivings: Gurdjieffian Philosophy, Spiritualism and Politics in the Art of Aaron Douglas" (Duke, R. Powell)

Walz, Jonathan F., "Abstract Portraiture and the American Avant-Garde, 1912–27" (Maryland, S. Promey)

Wilde, Tamara L., "Virgins and Vixens: Women, Musical Instruments, and Identity in Gilded Age Art" (Iowa, J. Kinsey)

Williams, Tom, "Pop Art, Youth Culture and Social Change in the 1960s" (SUNY Stony Brook, J. Katz, M. Bogart)

Witt, Susan Powell, "The Gendered Language of War: Visual Rhetoric and Cultural Power in Civil War America" (Stanford, B. Wolf)

Wolf, Vanessa, "Surplus Feeling: War and Remembrance in Lee Bontecou's Wall Reliefs, 1958–66" (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Yamamori, Yumiko, "The A. A. Vantine and Company: Japanese Handcrafts for the American Consumer, 1895–1920" (Bard CUNY, K. Ames, A. Ogata)

Yoshida, Atsushi, "Modern Eremites: Art and the Vocation of Withdrawal in Gilded Age America" (Washington, A. Miller)

Zarro, Jennifer, "Views of Philadelphia and the Culture of Geography, 1780–1800: Maps, Magazine Engravings, and William Birch" (Rutgers, W. Bellion)

Zundo, Mary Elizabeth, "Mapping Destiny: Cartography and Nineteenth–Century American Art of the Frontier" (UIUC, D. O'Brien)