News and Events

UCR, Art history doctoral student completes exhibition research at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

rachel shermock at the mfa boston

museum of fine art boston logo

Rachel Shermock completed a 10-week Paintings Exhibition Research graduate internship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston over the summer.

As an intern in the Art of Europe Department, Rachel worked specifically with collections that focused on early modern Netherlandish art as well as early modern Italian art where she gained incredible insight into how collections are curated. Rachel performed various tasks for the department, including conducting research on MFA held paintings, creating and updating gallery labels, assisting with potential gallery designs, meeting collectors, and attending faculty roundtable talks.

 

2026 Outstanding Teaching Assistant: Becky TeaqueCongratuations to Becky Teague! 

It is a distinct pleasure to announce that department faculty have nominated Rebecca Teague as this year’s outstanding Art History TA. Professors lauded Becky for her commitment to enhancing the education experiences of students in her sections. She is approaches the position with an enviable combination of enthusiasm, knowledge, poise, and organization. What’s more, Becky demonstrates an ongoing commitment to developing her teaching practices. Congratulations, Becky!

As always, there were many outstanding candidates. In this vein, the faculty identified Angelica Parr-Rosser as our runner up nominee. Most importantly, we recognize the dedication, work, and talent of each and every TA during the past year. Art History is known for offering great lower division courses, and TAs are a vital component of that!

Portraiture, Modernity, and the Materiality of Objects

14th Annual Art History Graduate Student Association Conference, University of California, Riverside | May 16, 2026 from 1:00-5:30 PM | Via Zoom
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Jenni Sorkin, Professor and Chair, History of Art & Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara

AHGSA Conference Flyer 2026The University of California, Riverside’s Art History Graduate Student Association is pleased to announce its 14th Annual Conference, Portraiture, Modernity, and the Materiality of Objects.

The distant jadeite stone–its cool blue-green echoing young maize–was carved in the Olmec world into the sacred form of the Kunz Axe. Cobalt carried along Mongol-era trade routes met Jingdezhen’s kaolin clay and, through kiln fired, produced blue-and-white porcelain. In Roman art, materials such as marble, bronze, and pigment shaped movement, light, and the sensory experience of power. Across cultures and histories, materials have shaped not only objects, but the conditions of making, meaning, and use. 

This conference invites graduate students to examine portraiture, modernity, and materiality as active forces rather than a passive surface. Matter speaks: their voice awakening the impulse to make. Objects are encountered through the body and the senses: handled, worn, repaired, and transformed over time. Drawing on approaches including phenomenology, material culture studies, and new materialisms, we ask how materials carry memory, structure experience, and demand particular modes of making, care, and interpretation.

 

 

AHGSA Graduate Student Conference Program2026

 

The conference will be held on Zoom on Saturday, May 16, 2026.
The conference is free and open to the public.

AHGSA Registration Link QR Code

VISITING SPEAKING SERIES

Replicated Afterlives: Reviving a Ruined Imperial Garden as Theme Park in Post-Mao China
Dr. Patricia J. Yu, Assistant Professor of Art History, Scripps College  

Replicated Afterlives: Reviving a Ruined Imperial Garden as Theme Park in Post-Mao ChinaThe Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness) currently stands as ruins on the outskirts of Beijing. Constructed in the eighteenth century as a garden-palace of the Qing emperors, it was infamously looted and burned by the Anglo-French in 1860 at the close of the Second Opium War. In the post-Mao era of the 1980s and 1990s, a fierce debate arose over whether to preserve its form as ruins or to reconstruct the imperial garden. In the meantime, developers seized upon the Yuanming Yuan as a model to replicate in theme park environments. This talk examines the off-site reproduction and displacement of the Yuanming Yuan as theme park reconstructions. I argue that the original Yuanming Yuan’s function as a Qing imperial microcosm is precisely what makes it an ideal model for replicating as theme parks that serve as national microcosms. I ask how the theme parks situate the Yuanming Yuan in historical time through the choice of its architectural replications; I also argue that the performances within the parks displace the Yuanming Yuan into a nebulous imperial past while simultaneously projecting it into an imagined national future. 

Monday, May 11 at 4:00pm
Arts Screening Room 335

Sponsored by the Asian Studies Program and the Department of the History of Art

 

2026 Brink Carrott Forster-Hahn Lecture Series
Thursday, April 30 at 5:30 in Arts 333


2026 Brink Carrott Forster-Hah Lecture SeriesEmily Citino, 2025 Barbara B. Brink Travel Award
Taking Care: Anna Maria Maiolino in Archives Across São Paulo
PhD student Emily Citino will discuss her research trip to São Paulo to view archival materials on the Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino (b. 1942) housed at four institutions across the city. In her talk, Emily will provide a brief overview of her dissertation, Anna Maria Maiolino: Art, Gender, Displacement (1960s–2020s), which is the first monographic study, in any language, of the artist. Although Maiolino emerged during the authoritarianism of the 1960s and 1970s, Emily’s project shifts focus from the country’s military dictatorship’s (1964–1985) to the entrenched male chauvinism of Brazil’s Catholic, conservative society, tracing the artist’s dynamic experimentation across new and traditional media, from performance and video to drawing and sculpture, and situating Maiolino’s practice alongside the expansion of women’s rights in Brazil. Throughout her talk, Emily will discuss how the financial support of the Barbara B. Brink Travel Award launched her dissertation research, providing access to essential, non-digitized archival materials.

Xinqian Zhang, 2025 Richard G. Carrott Travel Award
Heaven’s Craft in the Making of Things: Revisit Jingdezhen’s Porcelain
This presentation reflects on my recent research trip to Beijing and Jingdezhen in China, where I explored porcelain from both museum collections and production sites. While I initially approached porcelain as an object of circulation and representation, closely tied to imperial power and global exchange, my experience in Jingdezhen began to shift this perspective. Encountering kiln sites, workshop environments, and local materials, I began to see porcelain not just as a delicate finished object, but as a process shaped by the interaction of earth, water, fire, human labor, and living experience in the ecology and cosmotechinics of early modern China. Drawing on Tiangong Kaiwu, a seventeenth-century text on craft and technology that informs the title of this talk, I consider how porcelain production reflects a broader cosmological and material understanding of making, and the embodied experience with porcelain in tea culture as a mental and physical healing related to the medical humanities. By moving between institutional spaces and lived environments, this talk highlights how travel-based research can transform the way we understand material culture, bridging objects, processes, and ecological contexts.

Rebecca Allen, 2025 Françoise Forster-Hahn Travel Award
Alchemical Secrecy in Manuscript and Print: Das Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit and Pandora
This talk examines the transition from manuscript to print in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European alchemical texts through a case study of two works: the early fifteenth-century manuscript Das Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit (1410–1419) and the later printed book Pandora, das ist, die edelste Gab Gottes (1582). Drawing on research conducted for my M.A. thesis, it is grounded in firsthand study of materials at the Kupferstichkabinett, Herzog August Bibliothek, and Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, supported by the Françoise Forster-Hahn Travel Award. Special attention is given to Cod. 78 A 11 at the Kupferstichkabinett, widely understood as the earliest extant copy of Heilige Dreifaltigkeit. Because this manuscript is not digitized, direct examination was essential to my analysis of its images and text. By comparing it with later manuscript copies and printed adaptations, the talk considers how material form and image-text relationships structure the transmission of alchemical knowledge.

 

 

 

UC Riverside Scholar Selected for Elite NHC Summer Residency

Professor Susan Laxton will represent UCR at the National Humanities Center, advancing CHASS’s transformative humanities research on a national stage

March 26, 2026

Dr. Susan Laxton, 2026Demonstrating a loud and clear commitment to advancing its world-class research enterprise, the University of California, Riverside (UCR) announces that Susan Laxton, Associate Professor of Modernism and the History of Photography and Chair of the Department of the History of Art, has been selected for the esteemed National Humanities Center (NHC) Summer Residency program. Laxton will be one of 40 participants. Costs will be covered by the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, which has been a NHC Institutional Member since 2022.

The NHC Summer Residency Program is an exclusive, four-week fellowship designed to provide exceptional humanities scholars with a highly concentrated period of supported research and intellectual exchange. Held in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, the program is uniquely tailored to help scholars jump-start or make substantial progress on significant academic projects while fostering synergistic discussions with peers from across the country. Laxton’s project title is “Cut Together: Surrealist Photomontage and the Structure of Dissent.”

“For a historian of surrealism, the chance to think and write alongside colleagues equally absorbed in their work has its own dream logic,” Laxton said. “I am deeply grateful to the Dean, the Center for Ideas and Society, and the National Humanities Center for making it real.”

“Our deliberate investments in National Humanities Center programs lead our research university enterprise,” said Daryle Williams, Professor of History and Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. “When we commit resources to placing exceptional scholars like Professor Laxton in these competitive residencies, we see direct returns in the form of accelerated, field-defining publications and a magnified UCR presence on the national stage. It is an investment in the intellectual capital that drives the humanities forward.”

Championing Field-Defining Scholarship

Laxton brings a wealth of expertise and a distinguished record of scholarship to the NHC. A Ph.D. graduate of Columbia University, her research explores the alternative art practices of the 20th-century European avant-gardes, with a profound focus on photography, photomontage, and chance-based processes. She is the author of Surrealism at Play (Duke University Press, 2019) and is currently developing a new manuscript titled “Cut Together: Surrealist Photomontage and the Structure of Dissent.” Her field-defining scholarship has already been supported by prestigious fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Hellman Foundation, and the Borchard Foundation. Her work frequently appears in leading academic journals such as October and Critical Inquiry.

Elevating UCR’s Humanities Research

Laxton’s upcoming residency highlights UCR’s aggressive, strategic investment in faculty research and the university’s ongoing commitment to shaping the national conversation in the humanities. By supporting faculty through high-impact initiatives like the NHC Summer Residency, UCR ensures its scholars have the dedicated time, resources, and intellectual community required to produce groundbreaking, field-defining publications.

The Center for Ideas and Society (CIS) at UCR plays a vital role in championing these research endeavors, fostering an environment where humanistic inquiry thrives. Katharine Henshaw, Executive Director of CIS, is an alumna of the NHC humanities center director workshop and understands its importance.

“Professor Laxton’s selection for the NHC Summer Residency is a testament to the high caliber of research emerging from our College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences,” said Jeanette Kohl, Co-Director of the Center for Ideas and Society and Professor of Art History. “An internationally acclaimed art historian of photography and the current chair of her department, Professor Laxton will benefit greatly from the dedicated time the residency provides to focus on her research and writing. This opportunity will accelerate her next publication and bring an important scholarly intervention to the field all the more quickly.”

“Prof. Laxton’s Residency in the National Humanities Center’s summer program reflects a valued colleague’s advancement of the Center for Ideas and Society mission,” added Dylan Rodríguez, Distinguished Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Ideas and Society. “As a signature University of California research center supporting the interdisciplinary humanities at the UCR campus, the work of CIS is strengthened and advanced through Prof. Laxton’s national recognition by the NHC.” 

For more information about UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society and its ongoing research initiatives, please visit ideasandsociety.ucr.edu.