I am delighted to present The Department of the History of Art and Architecture's  (HIAA) report on our work in 2024-2025. Our goals as a department and as a community of scholars are to redefine the horizons of art and architectural history  research and develop undergraduate and graduate programs that span the interdisciplinary, historical study of fine arts, material culture, and the built environment. 

Our eleven tenure-track faculty operate on the cutting edge of their respective fields of study while collaborating with one another as well as scholars at Brown and around the world. As we embark on a new five year plan, the department is focusing on its essential role in the ecosystem of humanities and arts at Brown and on fulfilling the ideals of a liberal arts education.

Our initiatives in 2024-2025 focused on supporting research and teaching for our world-renowned faculty, sustaining our robust graduate program, and reinforcing the strengths and successes of our undergraduate curriculum.Our doctoral program continues to attract graduate students to work across art and architectural history and other disciplines at Brown. Our undergraduate students are flourishing while at Brown and, after graduation, are pursuing successful careers teaching at leading universities and holding prestigious positions in the world’s foremost museums and galleries. 

I encourage you to scroll down through this report to see what our faculty, students and alumni have accomplished this year!

We look forward to collaborating with you all in 2025-2026.

Best wishes,

Itohan Osayimwese

Professor and Chair, History of Art & Architecture

In 2024-2025 the Department of the History of Art and Architecture (HIAA) hosted three large scale lectures/symposia that attracted more than 400 members of the Brown, local, and national art historical communities. Hosting three large symposia is rare for our department and the breadth and diversity of topics and themes allowed a wide range of scholars from the humanities to participate in programming.

Our first large-scale event, Light in Art and Architecture, was a two day symposium at the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts. The keynote moment of this event was a conversation with Leo Villareal, the renowned artist whose LED light sculpture Infinite Composition is installed in the Nelson Atwater Lobby of the Lindemann Performing Arts Center at Brown. The second day of the symposium featured four of today's most prominent light artists and lighting designers in conversation with Brown University faculty.

The second of the large-scale events this year was a short term residency with internationally renowned art historian, Cécile Fromont. Partially funded by department endowments (with assistance from the Dean of the Faculty's Short-Term Visiting Professorship Program ) this public lecture and its accompanying object session at the John Carter Brown Library. 

Fromont is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, and the first faculty director of the Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at the Hutchins Center.

Funding from our donors also supported a symposium in December that examined the state of the field in the study of pre-modern art and architectural history (before 1500). This day-long series evoked great interest from humanities scholars throughout Brown largely due to its core concern regarding the state of the field in the study of the ancient and pre-modern world, and  the growing emphasis among emerging scholars and in current undergraduate curricula on modern and contemporary art.

Yannick Etoundi is a doctoral student Ph.D. candidate at in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and an Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow at the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. While a fellow, Etoundi served as co-curator for the exhibition  “In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World,” which debuted at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2024. He also acted as The Unfinished Conversations Series documentary project manager, researcher, and associate producer, while HIAA affiliate faculty member Prof. Anthony Bogues served as the Unfinished Conversations Series project director and documentary executive producer.

In addition, Yannick chaired the Graduate Student Lightning Talks at the 2025 Society of Architectural Historians annual conference. He sits on the SAH Graduate Students Advisory Committee at the SAH and is active in many areas of that organization. He was awarded a Beck Memorial Graduate Student Fellowship from the Society of Architectural Historians, as well as the 2025 John Coolidge Research Fellowship from the New England Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians.

History of Art & Architecture                

Kiara Bose Roy •  Billie Miro Breskin  •  Louisa Catherine Cavicchi  •  Qianan Chen  •  Elijah Emmett Cohen  •   Kayleigh Elizabeth Danowski  • William David De Luca  •  Quinn Fox Erickson  •  Keelin Victoria Gaughan  •  Tyler S. Gurth   •  Julia Hayden Heller  •  Andrew Lerner  •  Kimberly Ninson Leung  •  Olivia Haras Massey  •  Astrid Isabelle McMahon  •  Colette Fay Rohatyn •  Isabel Sage Roth-Dishy  •  Graham Delvin Routhier  •  Mason Lane Rudnick  •  Ines Sawiris  •  Caspar Erich Schliemann  •  Simone Allegra Straus

Architecture  

Laine Elizabeth Bechta  •  Carlos Delgado  •  Keelin Victoria Gaughan  •  Melany Gomez  •  Gabriel Anselmo Herrera  •  Jada Marae Joseph  •  Grace Dorgan Kelley  •  Anahis Luna Sanchez  •  Julia Park  •  Elise Morgan Petit  •  Nini Pharsenadze  •  Mariana Sabrina Gonzalez Po  •  Zoe-Anna Geneva Rudolph-Larrea  •  Jake Shawn Sheykhet   •  Jake Henry Srebnick  •  Colin Andrew Sutter   •  Charles Daniel Usadi  •  Abubakar F. Yussif

Dominic Jeffrey Clavell Bate 
Dissertation: "Pythagorean Visions: Figuring Harmony in England's Age of Projects"
Advisor: Evelyn Lincoln

Fosca Maddaloni-Yu 
Dissertation: "Setting China: Mounted Porcelains and Practices of Making in Early Modern China and Europe" 
Advisor: Jeffrey Moser

Implements of Impression Lecture Series

HIAA is looking forward to our 2025-2026 lecture series, Implements of Impression. The guiding thematic focus of the series of four lectures will be on the tools and techniques that artists and architects use to make works of art and architecture in multiples. 

Stay tuned for lecture dates and speaker info.

The Spear Endowed Lecture in Architecture

The 2025-2026 Spear Endowed Lecture will be presented by Anthony Acciavatti, Diana Balmori Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Yale University School of Architecture. This event is a collaboration with the Rhode Island chapter of the American Institute of Architects. 

Stay tuned for more info.

Incoming PhD Cohort

HIAA is excited to welcome four new doctoral students in fall 2025. The students, who hail from Harvard University, Grinnell College, University of Texas at Dallas, and Williams College, and will study the history of Islamic art, eighteenth and nineteenth-century architecture in the United States, and South Asian art.

• Benet Ge
• Nida Jaffer
• Lâl Verda Karaoğlu
• Tristan Whalen