History of Art and Architecture

Dissertations

Our graduates have gone on to hold positions in museums and academic departments throughout the nation and abroad. The faculty publishes and directs dissertations that range widely in terms of time, place, media, and methodology.

Here is a list of the department's recent dissertations:

2024

"Imagining the Modern Nation: Architect Nicolae Ghika-Budești and the Neo-Romanian Style" Ciprian Buzilă
"Blind Sticks and Dead Stones: Iconoclasm and Religious Art and Architecture in England, c.1382-1500" Oliver Coulson
"Fascism’s Adriatic Empire: Modern Architecture and Cultural Production in the Interwar Western Balkans" Peter Levins
“'Considered Only in Its Ultimate Nature': Photography Between Object and Idea" Allison Pappas

2023

"The Workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, 1609-40" Koen Bulckens
"Designing Seclusion: Staging Carthusian and Ducal Access to the Divine in Late Medieval Burgandy" Laura Chilson-Parks
“Blind Sticks and Dead Stones: Iconoclasm and Religious Art and Architecture in England, c.1382-1500” Oliver Coulson

2021

"The Antwerp Saint Luke's Guild: Its Impact on Artistic Production and Identity, 1556-1663" Suzanne Duff
"All Eyes on Russia: Margaret Bourke-White's Early Soviet Photographs" Josie Johnson
"Building an Order: Architecture, Space, and Gender in Isabelle of France’s Rule of Sorores Minores" Erica Kinias
“Printmaking in the Rome of Philip II, 1556-1598" Emily Monty

2020

"Interwar Explorations of Empire and British Identity: Modernism in Mandate Palestine" Michal Goldschmidt
"The Afterlife of the Plantation? Mass Housing and Town Planning in Barbados, 1930-1970"  Bill Skinner

2019

"Exhibiting the Medieval: The Use of Historicist Architecture in Modern Iberian Expositions, 1929-1940" Lia Dykstra
"Theories of Space in Early Postwar Germany: 1946-1952" Sara Hayat
"New Topographics and the Reinvention of American Landscape Photography, 1975" Emilia Mickevicius

2018 

"Reframing Art Photography:  Strategies of Display and Design in British Pictorialism, 1893-1909" Julia Barber
"Jinling Remembered: Nanjing as Topos in the Seventeenth Century" Amy Huang
"Feeding Rome:  Food, Architecture, and Urbanism, 1907-1943" Ruth Lo
"Angelic Devotion:  Embodying Belief with Bernini's Angels on the Ponte Sant'Angelo" Kelly Anne Whitford

2016

"Picturing Greater America:  U.S. Modernist Photography and the Mexican Cultural Renaissance, 1920-1945" Monica Bravo
"Qiao Zhongchang’s Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff: Text and Image, Poetry and Painting, and Narrative and Lyrical" Wei Jiang
"Modernization and Architecture Under the Rural Electrication Administration, 1935-1945." Sarah Rovang

2015

"Moving Beyond Vision:  Eadweard Muybridge in Philadelphia" Emily Handlin
"Thuscorum et Ligurum Securitati:  Cosimo I de'Medici and the Visual Program for the Order of Saint Stephen in Pisa and Florence" Joseph Silva

2014

"Inventors and Manipulators: Photography as Intellectual Property in Nineteenth-Century New York" Mazie Harris
"Becoming Walker Evans:  Photography, Literature, and Transnational Modernism, 1926-1938" Kristen Oehlrich
"Negotiating Military Identity in Early Modern State Portraiture" Lisa Tom
"Architecture and Urban Visions in Nineteenth-Century Utopian Literature" Nathaniel Robert Walker

2013

"A Bohemian Monastery: The Last Bishop of Prague (1301-1343) and the Monastery of Augustinian Canons at Roudnice (Raudnitz) on the Elbe" Alice Klima

2012

"Imaging and Imagining the Black Madonna of Le Puy: Ritual, Sacred Images and Race in Late Medieval and Early Modern France" Elisa Foster
"Examining the German Ledigenheim: Development of a Housing Type, Position in the Urban Fabric and Impact on Central European Housing Reform" Erin Eckhold Sassin
"Authorities of Presence: Robert Gill, the Photographic Survey of India, and the Colonial Sublime" Nathaniel Stein

2011

"Unchecked Ideas: Humor and the French Revolution in British Political Graphic Satire, 1789-1805" Amanda Lahikainen

2010

"Home Behind the Wall: The Living Spaces of Late Medieval German Convents" Caitlin Bass
"Vision in Motion: Architectural Space Time Notation and the Dynamic Perception of Space" Divya Heffley
"Interior Motives: The Vierge ouvrante/Triptych Virgin in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia" Melissa Katz
"Gender, Modernism, and Regional Identity: The Promotion and Reception of Künstlerinnen in Düsseldorf and the Rhineland, 1890-1920"  Anne Mitzen
"Unconventual Women: Politics, Religion, and Image in the Court Beguinages, c. 1585-c.1713" Sarah Joan Moran
"African Art at the Portuguese Court, c. 1450-1521" Mario Pereira
"The Narrative Document: Lewis Hine and ‘Social Photography" Kathy Quick
"Doorways to the Demonic and Divine: Visions of Santa Francesca Romana and the Frescoes of Tor de’Specchi" Suzanne Marie Scanlan
"'Drama Sustains the Spirit': Art, Ritual, and Theater in Jin and Yuan Period Pingyang, 1150-1350" Fan Zhang

2009

"Towards a Genealogy of Visual Culture at The Rhode Island School of Design, 1875-1900" Nancy Austin
"Images of Charles I of England, 1642-1649" Anna Rodriquez Farrar
"Scientizing Vision in China: Photography, Outdoor Sketching, and  the Reinvention of Landscape Perception, 1912-1949" Yi Gu
"Staging the Page : Graphic Caricature in Eighteenth-Century England" Hope Saska

2008

"Artistic Collaboration in Fascist Italy: Ardengo Soffici and Giorgio Morandi" Marianna Aguirre
"Embodiments of Empire: Figuring Race in Late Victorian Painting" Catherine Anderson
"Egypts in England: The Representation of Ancient Egypt at the Sydenham Crystal Palace"  Alexis Goodin
"Against Photography: The Idea of Music in Pre-Raphaelite Visual Reform” Laura Hendrickson
"The Sacred Public Sculptures in Antwerp: From Their Medieval Origins to the French Revolution" Nancy Kay
"Arts of the Franciscan Colegio de San Andre’s in Quito: A Process of Cultural Reformation" Andrea Lepage
"The Unifying Power of Moving Pictures in Late Medieval and Renaissance Umbria" Pascale Rihouet