Art of the United States
Dissertations in Progress by Subject, 2013

Show completed dissertations

Anania, Katherine, “Drawing, Discipline, and Privacy in American Studio Practice, 1963–1979” (UT Austin, R. Shiff)

Applebaum, Lauren, “Elusive Matter, Material Bodies: American Art in the Age of Electronic Mediation, 1865–1918” (UIUC, J. Greenhill)

Applegate, Heidi, “Staging Modernism at the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair” (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

Arabindan-Kesson, Anna, “Threads of Empire: The Visual Economy of the Cotton Trade in the Indian and Atlantic Ocean Worlds, 1840–1900” (Yale, H. Carby, T. Barringer)

Autry, La Tanya, “The Crossroads of Commemoration: Lynching Landscapes in America” (Delaware, C. Holloway)

Bacon, Elizabeth, “Drawing Machines: The Manual and the Mechanical in Art of the Early Republic” (Harvard, J. Roberts)

Bailey, Matthew, “Turbulent Bodies: Disruptive Materiality in American Painting, 1880–1940” (Washington University, A. Miller)

Banerji, Shiben, “Inhabiting the World: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Global Moral-Politics of Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin” (MIT, A. Dutta)

Barnhart, Clara, “‘A New Unity’: Montage in the Murals of Ben Shahn and Stuart Davis in the 1930s United States” (Washington University, A. Miller)

Baskin, Jill, “Picturing Freedom’s Shores: The Visual Culture of African Americans in Liberia, 1821–1865” (Virginia, L. Nelson)

Beck Cohen, Stephanie, “The Visual State: Liberian Art, Politics, and Economy at World’s Fairs, 1876–1984” (Indiana, Bloomington, P. McNaughton)

Beck, Sara, “From Kitchen Porn to Filthy Glamour: Marilyn Minter and New York, 1975–2005” (Rice University, G. Bader)

Beetham, Sarah, “Sculpting the Citizen Soldier: Reproduction and National Memory, 1865–1917” (Delaware, W. Bellion)

Begin, Jacob, “Gone but Not Forgotten: The Temporality and Technique of Portraiture on Gravestones in Rhode Island” (Boston, K. Morgan)

Berrill, Margot, “Kitchen Humour: Feminist Video Art and Pop Culture” (UIC, H. Higgins)

Besaw, Mindy, “Re-framing the American West: Contemporary Artists Engage the Past” (Kansas, C. Eldredge)

Bianco, Christine, “Modern Art for Middle America: American Abstraction in Postwar Mass Magazines” (Oxford Brookes, E. Darling)

Boone, Jobyl, “Christo and Jean-Claude in the United States, 1964–2005” (Delaware, A. Gibson)

Brand, Elizabeth Berler, “Sight and Insight: The Culture of Drawing in Philadelphia, 1770–1820” (UT Austin, S. Rather, M. Cohen)

Brueckner, Ellen, “Seeing Plus: The Photography of Group f.64” (Princeton, A. McCauley)

Brunstrom, Mary Reid, “Faith’s Midwest Modern Forms: Midcentury Catholic Churches by Murphy and Mackey, Architects” (Washington University, A. Miller)

Burnham, M. Helen, “Maude I. Kerns: Crafting a Modern Art, 1907–1940” (CUNY, K. Manthorne)

Butler, Eliza, “The Public Murals of Francis Davis Millet” (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

Campbell, Bryna, “The Comic Grotesque: Satirizing the Body Politic in American Caricature, 1925–1945” (Washington University, A. Miller)

Cao, Maggie M., “Episodes at the End of Landscape” (Harvard, J. Roberts)

Capper, Emily, “Allan Kaprow’s Formalism: Composing Pedagogy and Mixed Media in the Postwar American University” (Chicago, C. Mehring)

Chamberlain, Colby, “George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork” (Columbia, B. Joseph)

Charuhas, Christina, “Constructing Eighteenth-Century Bermuda: Utopia in the Transatlantic Imagination” (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

Choi, Connie, “A Matter of Building Bridges: Photography and African American Education across the Century” (Columbia, K. Jones)

Coleman, William, “Something of an Architect: Thomas Cole and the Country House Ideal” (UC Berkeley, M. Lovell)

Corcoran, Eloise, “‘Chalk-Talking’: Blackboards, Slates, and the Technology of Erasure in Nineteenth-Century American Visual Culture” (Yale, E. Cooke, Jr.)

Corrales-Diaz, Erin R., “Remembering the Veteran: Trauma, Disability, and the American Civil War, 1861–1915” (UNC Chapel Hill, R. Barrett)

Crawford, Katelyn D., “Transient Painters, Traveling Canvases: Portraiture and Mobility in the British Atlantic, 1750–1780” (Virginia, M. McInnis)

DeLosSantos, Jenevieve, “Envisioning Egypt: American Orientalism in Turn-of-the-Century New York, 1880–1920” (Rutgers, S. Sidlauskas)

Dierkes, Anne-Louise, “Assemblage as Opposition: California’s Counterculture and the Struggle for US Cultural Definition” (CUNY, A. Chave)

Douberley, Amanda, “The Corporate Model: Sculpture, Architecture, and the American City, 1946–1975” (UT Austin, A. Reynolds)

Eaton, Nicole, “Lt. Claggett Wilson, Queer Masculinity, and American Modernism” (Missouri, Columbia, K. Schwain)

Ericson, Klinton, “Sumptuous and Beautiful, As They Were: Architectural Form, Everyday Life, and Cultural Encounter in a Seventeenth-Century New Mexico Mission” (UNC Chapel Hill, E. Douglas)

Evans, Ariel, “To Compare Two Objects: Robert Heinecken and Martha Rosler, 1964–1984” (UT Austin, A. Reynolds)

Faletti, Rina, “Undercurrents of Urban Modernism: Water, Architecture, and Landscape in California and the American West” (UT Austin, M. Charlesworth, R. Shiff)

Favorite, Jennifer, “Museum Additions at US War Memorials and the Reinterpretation of National History” (CUNY, H. Senie)

Fravel, Laura, “Gazing Westward: The Quest for Unity in American Art Displays at the World’s Fairs, 1876–1916” (UNC Chapel Hill, R. Barrett)

Gavino, Julianne, “Visualizing Topographies of Race and Public Space: Asian American Artists in California, 1970 to Present” (UC Santa Barbara, B. Robertson)

Genau, Nicholas D., “Inventing Architectural Identity: The Institutional Architecture of James Renwick, Jr., 1818–1895” (Virginia, R. Wilson)

Gerami, Sheila, “The Hall of Fame for Great Americans: The Evolution of a Forgotten Memorial” (CUNY, H. Senie)

Gontar, Cybèle, “Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans: Portraiture, Identity, and Plantation Society in New Orleans, 1800–1860” (CUNY, K. Manthorne)

Green, Kate, “Encountering Vito Acconci: Performance in the Early 1970s” (UT Austin, A. Reynolds)

Green, Robin C. (Cowie), “‘A Certain Slant of Light’: Exhilaration, Oppression, and the Forces of Sunlight in American Impressionism” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Greenwold, Diana, “Crafting New Citizens: Art and Handicraft in American Settlement Houses, 1900–1945” (UC Berkeley, M. Lovell)

Grove, Jaleen, “A Cultural Trade: Canadian Magazine Illustrators at Home and in the United States, 1880–1960” (Stony Brook University, M. Bogart)

Hartvigsen, Kenneth, “‘What We See, What We Sing’: American Illustrated Sheet Music from the Civil War to World War I” (Boston, P. Hills)

Harvey, Edwin, “The Place, Space, and Practice of Andrew Wyeth’s Hay Ledge” (UC Berkeley, M. Lovell)

Hassan, S. Faisal, “Modernist Aberrations: The Dialectics of Expressionism in American Art and Architecture (1958–1992)” (MIT, M. Jarzombek, C. Jones)

Haviland, Mary, “Documenting Douglas Huebler: His Conceptual Works” (Virginia, H. Singerman)

Heung, Elsie, “Portraying Women’s Suffrage: Visual Arts and the Campaign for the Vote in the United States, 1900–1920” (CUNY, G. Levin)

Huang, Karen, “Artists’ Reenactments: The Vietnam War, the War on Terror, and the Performance of American Activism” (USC, K. Flint)

Igoe, Laura Turner, “The Opulent City and the Sylvan State: Art and Environmental Embodiment in Early National Philadelphia” (Temple, A. West)

Jacks Gamble, Lauren, “The Great American System: The Environmental Art of John Trumbull” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Jara, Jeff, “A Fine Tradition: Folk Art and the Development of Modernist American Art, 1900–1940” (Delaware, A. Gibson, C. Holloway)

Jentleson, Katie, “Gatecrashers: The First Generation of Outsider Artists in America” (Duke, R. Powell)

Johns, Barbara, “Knowing Your Place: Issei Artists in Seattle/Kenjiro Nomura, Kamekichi Tokita, and Takuichi Fujii” (University of Washington, S. Casteras)

Jordan, Cara, “Joseph Beuys and Social Sculpture in the United States: Suzanne Lacy, Rick Lowe, and Mary Jane Jacob” (CUNY, H. Senie)

Kerrigan, Emily A., “Art off the Beaten Path: Developing American Modernism in New England’s Small Towns, Seaports, and Villages” (Iowa, J. Kinsey)

Ketcham, Christopher M., “Repetition and the City: Minimalism’s Spatial Politics, 1962–1972” (MIT, C. Jones)

Kim, Joy Jeehye, “New Documents to Pictures: Lee Friedlander and the Re-making of the Photographic Image, 1962–1989” (Yale, D. Joselit)

Kim, Miri, “‘Right Matter in the Right Place’: The Paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder” (Princeton, R. DeLue)

King, Jennifer, “Michael Asher and the Art of Infrastructure: Space, Cities, Institutions” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Kivlan, Anna, “Destination Dystopia: Color Photography in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee, 1968–2005 (Duke, R. Powell)

Kohn, Tara, “Books to Connect ‘People of the Book’: Photographic Constructions of Jewish Community in Three American Anthologies” (UT Austin, C. Smith)

Kubo, Michael, “Incorporating Architecture: TAC and the Business of Collaborative Practice, 1945–1983” (MIT, M. Jarzombek)

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

Larson, Christina, “Paul Sample: Defining American Masculine Identity” (Case Western Reserve, H. Adams)

Lee, Patricia, “Browning the White Body: Race, Color, and Perception in Modern American Visual Culture” (UC Santa Barbara, B. Robertson)

Lescher, Mary E., “The Little Studio That Could: Walt Disney Feature Animation’s Florida Studio” (Florida State, R. Neuman)

Levenson, Abra, “Figures and Things: Charles Demuth, 1914–1935” (Princeton, R. DeLue)

Lewis, Sarah, “Pictures and Progress: Frederick Douglass, the Circassian Beauties, and American Racial Formation” (Yale, A. Nemerov, R. Thompson)

Lopes, Shana, “‘The Fraternity throughout the World’: American and German Photography, Interactions from 1840 to 1890” (Rutgers, T. Sheehan)

LoScerbo, Gianna, “A Struggle for the Real: Documentary Photography and Film in Post-WWII American Culture” (Rutgers, A. Zervigón)

Lueth, Ranelle M., “Conflicting Lines: The Ambush on America's World War I Combat Art” (Iowa, J. Kinsey)

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

Mays, Eowyn, “Tracing the Imperial Imaginary in American and Philippine Visual Culture from 1898 to 1913” (Maryland, College Park, R. Ater)

McCann, Justin, “Elastic Capacities: Whistler and the Art of Transformation” (Rutgers, S. Sidlauskas)

McCarthy, Megan, “The Empire on Display: Exhibitions of Germanic Art and Design in America, 1890–1914” (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

McClellan, Meghan, “Snapshot Satire: Visual Conversations among Women Photographers, 1860–1910” (Missouri, Columbia, K. Schwain)

Mericle, Robyn, “Utopianism in Art and Visual Culture of the American Desert, 1910–1940” (UIC, H. Higgins)

Merola, Rose, “Multiple Exposures: The Photography of Austin Hansen in Harlem” (CUNY, A. Chave)

Metcalf, Megan, “Dancing with the Art World: Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, and Simone Forti Encounter the Contemporary Art Museum” (UCLA, M. Kwon)

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

Moon, Kavior, “Form and Operation: Works by Michael Asher, ca. 1979–2011” (UCLA, M. Kwon)

Newbury, Susanna, “Speculations: Art and Real Estate Development in Los Angeles, 1960–1968” (Yale, D. Joselit)

Newton, Gregory, “The Emergence of Monochrome Painting in 1950s New York” (CUNY, A. Chave)

O’Donnell, Charles, “Making Art History in America” (UC Berkeley, W. Davis)

Obniski, Monica, “Accumulating Things: Folk Art and Modern Design in the Postwar American Projects of Alexander H. Girard (1907–1993)” (UIC, R. Bruegmann)

Oliver, Christopher, “Civic Visions: The Panorama and Popular Amusement in American Art and Society, 1845–1870” (Virginia, M. McInnis)

Orgeman, Keely, “Visualizing the Irradiated Body and Radioactive Landscape in American Art, 1945–2010” (Boston, P. Hills)

Osdene, Stefan, “American Neon: Illuminating the Built Environment with Messages of Consumerism, 1900–1970” (Wisconsin, Madison, A. Smart Martin)

Parsons, Heather, “The Tableaux of Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz and the Spectacle of Photography” (Penn State, S. Rich)

Parsons, Jennifer Stettler, “John Sloan: Between Philadelphia and New York, 1892–1907” (Virginia, E. Turner)

Pauwels, Erin, “Sarony’s Living Pictures: Performance, Photography, and Gilded Age American Art” (Indiana, Bloomington, S. Burns)

Pfohl, Katie, “American Painting and the Systems of World Ornament” (Harvard, J. Roberts)

Quick, Jennifer, “The Dynamics of Skill: Ed Ruscha 1956–1970” (Harvard, R. Kelsey)

Raimond, Ellen, “The Artist as Immigrant: Performative Photographic Projects by Tseng Kwong Chi, Nikki S. Lee, and Annu Palakunnathu Matthew” (Kansas, J. Pultz)

Ramsey, Rosemary, “Biases and Bridges: Reception of the Italian Avant-Garde in the United States, 1949–1957” (CUNY, E. Braun)

Ranogajec, Paul, “The Apotheosis of the Public Realm: Classical Architecture in New York City, 1880–1914” (CUNY, K. Murphy)

Reed, Emily, “Alexander Calder, Naum Gabo, Isamu Noguchi, and the Pre- and Post-War Development of Abstract Art for Public Space” (Virginia, E. Turner)

Reinoza, Tatiana, “Latino Print Cultures in the US, 1970–2008” (UT Austin, C. Smith)

Rivers, Tina, “‘Lights in Orbit’: The Howard Wise Gallery and the Rise of Media in the 1960s” (Columbia, B. Joseph)

Robbins, Karen, “Discipline and Polish: Teaching Domesticity at the Connecticut Industrial School for Girls, 1868–1917” (Boston, K. Morgan)

Rodgers, Josephine, “Patronage, Power, and Aesthetic Taste: The Partnership of James McNeill Whistler and Charles Lang Freer, 1890–1919” (Rutgers, S. Sidlauskas)

Ronan, Kristine, “Buffalo Dancer: The Biography of an Image” (Michigan, D. Doris)

Ruud, Brandon, “Beneath the Surface: The Aesthetic and Ideological Appropriation of Native American Art and Design, 1875–1925” (UIC, E. Baird)

Salseda, Rose, “The Visual Art Legacy of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots” (UT Austin, C. Smith)

Sarmiento, Kelema Moses, “Between Hegemony and Imperialism in Honolulu: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Visualities of a US City in the Pacific (1900–1970)” (Penn State, C. Zabel)

Sawyer, Drew, “Walker Evans’s Cultures of Work and the Politics of Style” (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

Scarlett, Sarah Fayen, “Everyone’s an Outsider: Architecture, Landscape, and Class in Michigan’s Copper Country” (Wisconsin, Madison, A. Andrzejewski)

Schiller, Emily, “Unsettled Masses: Transportation in American Art during the 1930s and 1940s” (Penn State, N. Locke, L. Mazow)

Schwartz, Rebecca Ayres, “Thomas Cole on Architecture: Picturing the Gothic” (Delaware, B. Herman)

Scott, Kate, “The Photography of Absence: Death and Temporality in Postmodern American Photography” (Rutgers, A. Zervigón)

Shannon, Heather A., “Just an Amateur: Adam Clark Vroman, Photography, and the American West, 1895–1904” (Rutgers, T. Sheehan)

Sirman, Brian, “Concrete Dreams: Architecture, Politics, and Boston’s New City Hall, 1960–2010” (Boston, K. Morgan)

Situ, Xiao, “Emily Dickinson’s Window Culture, 1830–1886” (Yale, A. Nemerov, E. Cooke, Jr.)

Sivert, Laura, “Powering a Nation: The Cultural Landscape of the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933–1945” (Penn State, C. Zabel)

Slipp, Naomi, “The Secret Figure: Artistic Anatomy and the Search for the Medical Body in Nineteenth-Century American Art” (Boston, P. Hills)

Smith, Ginger Elliott, “Practicing Big Science: Artists, Technology, and Institutions in 1960s and 1970s Southern California” (Boston, G. Williams)

Stein, Deborah, “Charles Callahan Perkins, Classical Sculpture, and the Rhetorical Tradition in Boston” (Boston, K. Morgan)

Swisher, Christine, “Beyond Euthenics: Home Economics and the Reinvention of the American House, 1893–1939” (Penn State, C. Zabel)

Szymanek, Angelique, “The Fear of Rape, the Threat of Looking: Performance, Activism, and Spectatorship” (Binghamton University, T. McDonough)

Taylor, Jacqueline, “Designing Progress: Race, Gender, and Modernism in Early Twentieth- Century America” (Virginia, R. G. Wilson)

Terry, Colleen, “Presence in Print: William Hogarth in British North America” (Delaware, B. Herman)

Thomas, Adam, “The Spectral Imagination: American Art between Science and Superstition in the Late Nineteenth Century” (UIUC, J. Greenhill)

Thompson, Whitney, “Foreign-born Artists Making ‘American’ Pictures: The Immigrant Experience and the Art of the United States, 1819–1893” (CUNY, K. Manthorne)

Torbert, Amy, “Going Places: The Material and Imagined Geographies of Prints in the Atlantic World, 1770–1840” (Delaware, W. Bellion)

Trench, Carolyn J., “Performativity’s Moment: Vogue, Queer Video Production, and Theoretical Discourse” (Pennsylvania, G. D. Shaw)

Tritch Roman, Gretta, “The Reach of the Pit: The Multiple Spheres of the Chicago Board of Trade Building in the Nineteenth Century” (Penn State, C. Zabel)

Truitt, Andrea, “Experiencing the Otherworldly: Magazine Reading and Illustrations of Orientalist Domestic Space in the United States, 1880–1920” (Minnesota, J. Marshall, K. Solomonson)

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

Varet, Esther Kim, “Art INC: A Re-assessment of the Art and Technology Program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art” (Columbia, A. Alberro)

Vargas-Santiago, Luis, “Bridging Zapata: Transnational Images across Mexico and the US” (UT Austin, A. Giunta)

Violette, Zachary, “Ornament and Identity in the Immigrant-Built Tenements of Boston and New York, 1870–1920” (Boston, K. Morgan)

Vittoria, Shannon, “Nature and Nostalgia in the Etchings of Mary Nimmo Moran (1842–1899)” (CUNY, K. Manthorne)

Walsh, Catherine, “‘Tell Me a Story’: Narrative and Orality in Nineteenth-Century American Visual Culture” (Delaware, W. Bellion)

Walsh, Taylor, “Medium at the Margins: Bruce Nauman, 1965–1975” (Harvard, C. Lambert-Beatty, B. Buchloh)

Warak, Melissa, “Made to Music: Interactions of Music and Art, 1955–1969” (UT Austin, L. Henderson)

Warner, Emily, “Painting the Abstract Environment: The Abstract Mural in New York, 1935–1960” (Pennsylvania, M. Leja)

Weaver, Alison, “The Beuys Effect: Joseph Beuys’s Reception in the United States” (CUNY, A. Chave)

Webb-Bindner, Bernida Anne, “Tracing the Black Pacific: Notions of Blackness in the Art of Oceania and the United States, 1898–2008” (Cornell, C. Finley)

Weintraub, Sara, “From Design to Completion: The Transformation of US War Memorials on the National Mall” (CUNY, H. Senie)

Welch, Adam, “‘Borderline Research’: Art between Canada and the United States, 1965–1980” (Toronto, E. Legge)

White, Rachel, “Magazine Wars: The Visual Politics of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, 1935–1945” (UIUC, T. Weissman)

Williams, Elizabeth, “Casting a New Mold: The American Silver Industry and Japanese Meiji Metalwork, 1876–1893” (Kansas, S. Fowler)

Wolf, Vanessa, “Surplus Feeling: War and Remembrance in Lee Bontecou’s Wall Reliefs, 1958–1966” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Woltmann, Kim, “Photographing Place: Urban Space in Catherine Opie’s Los Angeles Landscapes” (Stony Brook University, M. Bogart)

Wong, Hannah, “A ‘Funny Guy’ Comes to America: Parody, Play, Irony, and the Role of Humor in the Work of Francis Picabia, 1913–1917” (UT Austin, L. Henderson)

Wood Kirchhoff, Mary Catherine, “Benjamin West’s Nelson Memorial: Neoclassical Sculpture and the Atlantic World, ca. 1812” (Delaware, W. Bellion)

Yau, Elaine, “Sister Gertrude Morgan’s Material Performances and the Sensory Cultures of New Orleans, 1960–1983” (UC Berkeley, M. Lovell)

Young, Megan, “After the Deluge: Contemporary Artists Engage Katrina” (Kansas, D. Cateforis)

Zavistovski, Katia, “Uncommon Objects: The Representational Painting of Vija Celmins, Llyn Foulkes, and Joe Goode in 1960s LA” (Rice University, G. Bader)

Zawadzki, Mary, “St. Nicholas Magazine: A Portable Art Museum” (CUNY, P. Mainardi)

Zhurauliova, Tatsiana, “Arcadia Americana: Landscape in American Art during World War II” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Zundo, Mary Elizabeth, “Mapping Destiny: Cartography and Nineteenth-Century American Art of the Frontier” (UIUC, D. O’Brien)