Completed 2015-2016

Melissa Wolf (Fall 2015)
From Steamboats to Snow White: How the Mickey Mouse Short Films Between 1928 and 1934 resulted in a Shift from an Abstract to a Naturalistic Animation Style in the Disney Studios
Committee: Jason Weems (Chair), Susan Laxton, and Catherine Gudis (History)

Kelly Filreis (Spring 2016)
Picturing Process: Lynda Benglis’ Cantilevered Pours
Committee: Elizabeth Kotz (Chair), Susan Laxton, and Jason Weems

Sara Greenberg (Spring 2016)
Two Sides of the Same Street: Depression-Era Photography of Central Park and Fifth Avenue
Committee: Patricia Morton (Chair), Susan Laxton, and Jason Weems

Reva Main (Spring 2016)
Eggleston, Christenberry, Divola: Color Photography Beyond the New York Reception
Committee: Susan Laxton (Chair), Jason Weems, and Elizabeth Kotz

Diana Navarrete (Spring 2016)
The End of Things: Reading Exegetical Apocalypticism in the Prefatory Miniatures of Private Female Ottonian Manuscripts
Committee: Conrad Rudolph (Chair), Jeanette Kohl, and Kristoffer Neville

Victoria Taormina (Spring 2016)
Collaborative Bodies in Action: Senga Nengudi’s R.S.V.P. Respondez S’il Vous Plait (1977/2003)
Committee: Elizabeth Kotz (Chair), Jason Weems, and Jayna Brown (Ethnic Studies)

Juliann Walker (Spring 2016)
Carlo Fontana and the Origins of the Architectural Monograph
Committee: Kristoffer Neville (Chair), Jeanette Kohl, and Conrad Rudolph

Completed 2014-2015

Leslie Paprocki (Fall 2014)
Rush and Wait: Airports, Seriality, and Undecidability in the Work of Garry Winogrand 
Committee: Susan Laxton (Chair), Patricia Morton, and Elizabeth Kotz

Mateusz Ferens (Spring 2015)
Dionysius of Fourna: Artistic Identity Through Visual Rhetoric
Committee: Conrad Rulolph (Chair), Jeanette Kohl, and Kristoffer Neville

Theresa Knopp (Spring 2015)
Facing Independence: Portraiture and the Figuring of Nationalism in the Work of Jose Gil de Castro
Committee: Aleca Le Blanc (Chair), Malcolm Baker, and Jason Weems

Ashley Medina (Spring 2015)
Melchiorre Cafa and Camillo Pamphilj: The Art of Patronage in Seventeenth-Century Rome
Committee: Kristoffer Neville (Chair), Malcolm Baker, Jeanette Kohl

Cyle Metzger (Spring 2015)
Queer Phenomenology in Sarah Oppenheimer’s W-120301
Committee: Elizabeth Kotz (Chair), Jason Weems, and Jack Halberstam (USC)

Sandra Schmitz (Spring 2015)
Saving Carnegie Hall: A Case Study of Historic Preservation in Postwar New York City
Committee: Patricia Morton (Chair), Jason Weems, and Catherine Gudis (History)

Rachel Zimmermann (Spring 2015)
Addresses To/Through/Within a Public Sphere: Politics and Performativity in Contemporary Photo-Works
Committee: Susan Laxton (Chair), Jason Weems, and Judith Rodenbeck (Media Cultural Studies)

Astara Light (Summer 2015)
The Power of “Visual Movement:” Re-shaping and Re-affirming Religious Practices in Modern Balinese Paintings
Committee: Jeanette Kohl (Chair), Jong Phil Park, Christina Schwenkel (Anthropology), and Maria See (Media Cultural Studies)

Andrew Turner (Fall 2013)
Sex, Myth, and Metaphor in Moche Pottery
Committee: Jason Weems (chair), Karl Taube (Anthropology), Jeanette Kohl and Stella Nair (UCLA)

Fernando Ramirez (Fall 2013)
Object and Image in the Work of Jack Goldstein
Committee: Elizabeth Kotz (chair), Susan Laxton and Jason Weems

Ana Ramey (Spring 2014)
Portrait Paradox: Complicating Identity in Catherine Opie’s “Being and Having”
Committee: Elizabeth Kotz (chair), Susan Laxton and Jeanette Kohl

Margaret Wallace (Spring 2014)
George Bellows Paints California: A Summer Escape Out West
Committee: Jason Weems (chair), Susan Laxton and Jessica Smith (Chief Curator of American Art, The Huntington)

Edgar Ramirez (Spring 2014)
The Canterbury Roll: A Viewer’s Guide of the Twelve Typological Windows at Canterbury Cathedral
Committee: Conrad Rudolph (chair), Jason Weems and Jeanette Kohl

Amy Whitacre (Summer 2014)
Proposed: The Warriors of Tula: Iconography, Identity, and the Sculpted Body in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica
Committee: Jason Weems (chair), Jeanette Kohl, Karl Taube (Anthropology) and Stella Nair (UCLA)

Brooke Devenney (Summer 2014)
Gregory Ain: Challenging the Anonymity of the Utopian Ideal in Planned Housing Communities, 1939-1948
Committee: Patricia Morton (chair), Jason Weems and Kristoffer Neville

Chelsea Herr (Summer 2014)
Proposed: The Native American as Commodity: The Visual Production of Native Students at Sherman Institute, 1930-1947
Committee: Jason Weems (chair), Susan Laxton, and Clifford Trafzer (History)

Jessica Orzulak (Summer 2014)
Proposed: Picturing Soldaduras: Images of Female Revolutionaries in the 1910 Mexican Revolution
Committee: Jason Weems (chair), Elizabeth Kotz and Freya Schiwy (Hispanic Studies)

Leslie Paprocki (Fall 2014)
Proposed: Rush and Wait: Airports, Seriality, and Undecidability in the Work of Garry Winogrand
Committee: Susan Laxton (chair), Patricia Morton, and Elizabeth Kotz

Kaelyn Rodriguez (Summer 2014)
Authorship and Memory in Judy Baca’s Murals
Committee: Susan Laxton (chair), Patricia Morton, and Elizabeth Kotz

Completed 2012-2013

Betty Schlothan (Spring 2013)
Intriguing Relationships: An Exploration of Early Modern German Prints of Relic Displays and Reliquaries
Committee: Jeanette Kohl (Chair), Conrad Rudolph, and Blair Davis

Michaeline Anderson (Summer 2013)
Robert Adams and the Mythology of the Landscape of the American West
Committee: Susan Laxton (Chair), Elizabeth Kotz, Susan Laxton, and Jason Weems

Elizabeth Franks (Summer 2013)
Capturing Motion: A Catalog Raisonne of the Photomontage Works of Barbara Morgan 1935-1980
Committee: Susan Laxton (Chair), Elizabeth Kotz, and Patricia Morton

Completed 2011-2012

Avivi, Adele
Between Dada and Architecture: Marcel Janco in Zurich and Bucharest, 1916-1939
Chair: Susan Laxton, Patricia Morton and Eva Forgacs

Garcia, Dominique
Materials of the Sacred: 16th to 18th Century Religious Materiality in Michoacan
Chair: Stella Nair, Karl Taube, Kristoffer Neville and Jennifer Hughes

Goetting, Carol
Guarino Guarini: His Architecture and the Sublime
Chair: Kristoffer Neville, Jeanette Kohl and Conrad Rudolph

Gomez, Gabriela Rodriguez
Re-Conceptualizing Social Medicine in Diego Rivera’s History of Medicine in Mexico: The People’s Demand for Better Health Mural, Mexico City, 1953.
Chair: Jason Weems, Elizabeth Kotz and Karl Taube

Machado, Erin
Imagining Chivalry: Charles V’s Suits of Steel
Chair: Jeanette Kohl, Kristoffer Neville and Charlene Villaseñor Black (UCLA)

Owen, Caroline
Allan Sekula, Margarita Cabrera and Vik Muniz: Representations of the Social Conditions and Capital Relations of Labor
Chair: Patricia Morton, Susan Laxton, Elizabeth Kotz and Freya Schiwy

Peltakian, Danielle
Demonstrating Modernism: Richard Neutra’s Early Model Houses
Chair: Patricia Morton, Jason Weems and Catherine Gudis

Pfahler, Zachary
Robert Heinecken’s TV/Time Environment
Chair: Susan Laxton, Elizabeth Kotz and Catherine Gudis

Rotfeld, Masha
The Fantasy and Fear of Chernobyl’s Ruins
Chair: Patricia Morton, Susan Laxton and Liz Kotz

Williams, Sarah
A Language of Rebuilt Reality: The Photography of Robert Cumming in the 1970s
Chair: Susan Laxton, Elizabeth Kotz and Erika Suderburg

Wolfe, Harmony
Landscapes of Dance: the 1960 Summer Workshop of Anna Halprin
Chair: Elizabeth Kotz, Patricia Morton, and Jacqueline Murphy

Completed 2010-2011

Cho, Younhee
The Relationship Between Architecture and Sculpture of St. Paul’s, London
Chair: Malcolm Baker, Kristoffer Neville and Jeanette Kohl

Corey, Mary
Salvador Dali’s Bacchanale: A “Paranoiac” Ballet
Chair: Françoise Forster-Hahn, Susan Laxton and Jason Weems

Hampton, Steve
Bad Painting and Kitsch
Chair: Patricia Morton, Jason Weems and Elizabeth Kotz

Osenbaugh, Elizabeth
Replacing the Icon: Seventeenth-Century Tomb Monuments for Dutch Naval Heroes by Rombout Verhulst
Chair: Kristoffer Neville, Malcolm Baker and Jeanette Kohl

Ridel, Amanda-Nicole
Modification of Market: John Smith and the Mezzotint Print in Eighteenth-Century England
Chair: Malcolm Baker, Kristoffer Neville and George Haggerty

Siegfried, Laura
The Art of Seeing in Perspective: How Medieval Optical Science Transformed into Renaissance Painting
Chair: Jeanette Kohl, Kristoffer Neville and Conrad Rudolph

Vasiliou, Tia
The Power of Suggestiveness: Sadakichi Hartmann, Thomas Wilmer Dewing and American Modernism
Chair: Jason Weems, Françoise Forster-Hahn, Jessica Smith (The Huntington)

Wilder, Courtney
Staging Display in the Sculptural Work of Yinka Shonibare MBE
Chair: Malcolm Baker, Elizabeth Kotz and Jeanette Kohl

Completed 2009-2010

Blythe, Megan 
The Meisterhauser and Director’s House at the Dessau, Bauhaus:  Experiments in Factory-Made Homes
Chair: Françoise Forster-Hahn, Patricia Morton, Elizabeth Kotz

Brocka, Melinda 
Thinking Inside the Square: Contemporary Monumentality, Site Specificity and Trafalgar Square’s Empty Fourth Plinth
Chair: Elizabeth Kotz, Patricia Morton, Jason Weems, Malcolm Baker

Dickey, Caitlin  
The Development of the First Public Opera Houses:  the Demands, the Form, and the First Scenographic Engineer
Chair: Kristoffer Neville, Malcolm Baker, Rogerio Budasz

Sadoyan, Lilit  
Collecting at Court and Beyond: The Dissemination and Display of Girardon’s Sculptural Groups
Chair: Malcolm Baker, Kristoffer Neville, Catherine Hess

Spear, Elizabeth  
History on Stage: Looking Back at “The West as America”
Chair: Jason Weems, Stella Nair, Françoise Forster-Hahn

Thoreson, Natasha  
Stitching the Divide:  Mary Morris, Gender, and the Amateur in the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and the United States
Chair: Jason Weems, Françoise Forster-Hahn, Malcolm Baker

Completed 2008-2009

Entwistle, Conley Wayne 
Le Train a-t-il quitte la gare?  Hybrid Modernities at the Muse d’Orsay
Chair: Patricia Morton, Françoise Forster-Hahn, Elizabeth Kotz

Johnson, Julianne  
Constructing an Identity for Artist and City:  An analysis of the Trans-Atlantic Career of Mateo Perez de Alesio
Chair: Stella Nair, Kristoffer Neville, Jeanette Kohl, Jason Weems

Millard, Robert  
Compassion and Convention:  A Study of Piero di Cosimo’s Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs
Chair: Jeanette Kohl, Kristoffer Neville, Conrad Rudolph

Park, Alice  
The Doni, Raphael and Michelangelo – Patrons and Purveyors of Domestic Art
Chair: Kristoffer Neville, Dale Kent, Jeanette Kohl

Picano, Bruce  
Constructing Identities:  Race, Gender and Class in the Photography of Martin Chambi
Chair: Stella Nair, Jason Weems, Jonathan Ritter

Yang, Hsiao-Chi  
Reading Fashion, Reading Taiwan:  The New Period of Taiwan in the 1990s
Chair: Elizabeth Kotz, Patricia Morton, Heidi Brevik-Zender

Completed 2007-2008

Barron, Jennifer Adair
Chimu Feather Imagery: The Mercantile Shift Symbolized
Chair: Stella Nair, Karl Taube and Carol Mackey

Gomez-Adams, Rosalva
Creating Identity in New Spain: Translation in the Biombo “El Encuentro de Cortes y Moctezuma”
Chair: Stella Nair, Karl Taube, and Monica Dominguez Torres

Hickey, Benjamin
The Aesthetics of Trying
Chair: Pat Morton, Françoise Forster-Hahn and Liz Kotz

Huh, Jee Woon
De la vision a la realite: Devotional Images of Three Female Patrons at Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Burgundian Court
Chair: Kris Neville, Dale Kent, and Conrad Rudolph

Peng, Min
Fluid Bridge: The Cultural Identity of the Overseas Chinese Artist, Huang Yong Ping
Chair: Liz Kotz, Ginger Hsu, and Pat Morton

Popp, Lauren Diane
Beyond the White Cube: Ideology of the Alternative Museum
Chair: Liz Kotz, Françoise Forster-Hahn and Pat Morton

(By filing date)

Kwon, Myoung-Jung. “Alternative Realities: Representations of U.S. Race Relation in Korean American Video,” 1998.
Committee: Amelia Jones, Chairperson; Patricia Morton; Edward T. Chang

Lin, Chia-Jung. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Female Figures and Victorian Womanhood,” 1998.
Committee: Patricia Morton, Chairperson; Amelia Jones; Jennifer Brody

Weller, Rebecca A. “Writing the Body: The Work of Mira Schor, Lynn Hershman, and Catherine Opie,” 1998.
Committee: Amelia Jones, Chairperson; Patricia Morton, Carole-Anne Tyler

Preston, Genevieve M. “A Modern Setting for a Modern Life: Madame Stringberg, Ethel Sands, and Lady Drogheda’s Innovative and Avant-garde Interiors,” 1998
Committee: Patricia Morton, Chairperson; Françoise Forster-Hahn; Kimberly Devin

Christensen, Nina M. “The Myth of Danae in Pompeian Domestic Painting,” 1997
Committee: Steven F. Ostrow, Chairperson; Conrad Rudolph, Michele Salzman

McFaull, Michele L. “Patroness of the Gilded Age: Isabella Stewart Gardner,” 1997
Committee: Françoise Forster-Hahn, Chairperson; Steven F. Ostrow; Cecile Whiting

Ogle, Susan F. “Laura Gilpin: Unconventional Daughter of the West,” 1997
Committee: Amelia Jones, Chairperson; Patricia Morton; Jonathan Green

Parsley-Welsh, Krista L. “Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna of the Harpies: A Reflection of Conventual Franciscan Beliefs,” 1997
Committee: Steven F. Ostrow, Chairperson; Conrad Rudolph; Dale V. Kent

McCullough, Thomas P. “The Admonitions of the Court Instructress to the Palace Women: Gender Roles, Gender Ideology and Gender Difference in Early Medieval China,” 1997.
Committee: Ginger Hsü, Chairperson; Amelia Jones; Yenna Wu

Vellucci, Sabine M. “The Milan Sarcophagus: A Reconsideration,” 1997.
Committee: Conrad Rudolph, Co-Chair; Michael Behen, Co-Chair; Steven F. Ostrow

Willick, Damon. “Jackson Pollock as a Critical Construction: The Author-Function Pollock,” 1996.
Committee: Amelia Jones, Chairperson; Patricia Morton; Erika Suderburg

Roy, Nina T. “The Third Space Critique: The Diasporic Cinema of Ismail Merchant and Mira Nair in Relation to Colonial and Post-Colonial Theory,” 1996.
Committee: Patricia Morton, Chairperson; Steven Ostrow; Marguerite Waller

Chau, Amelia Kit-Yiu. “East-West Negotiations: The Evolution of the Void in the Paintings of Zao Wou-Ki,” 1995.
Committee: Ginger Hsü, Chairperson; Françoise Forster-Hahn; Zhang Longxi

Powell, Barbara D. “Henry Ives Cobb: Architecture, Culture and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition,” 1995.
Committee: Patricia Morton, Chairperson; Françoise Forster-Hahn; Sharon Salinger

Ota, Pauline A. “Tanomura Chikuden’s Mata mata ichiraku jo: Personal Expression Through the Imported, Symbolic Vocabulary of the Chinese literati,” 1995.
Committee: Ginger Hsü, Chairperson; Vivian-Lee Nyitray; Steven F. Ostrow

Hickman, Madelia A. “Fulfilling a Prophecy: Feminist Images of Women at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition,” 1995.
Committee: Patricia Morton, Chairperson; Françoise Forster-Hahn; Carole Shammas

Elliott-Tespitaks, Tara J. “International Fluidity Versus National Constraint: Cross Border Performativity and its Role in the Construction of a Tai-centric Aesthetic,”1995.
Committee: Amelia Jones, Chairperson; Patricia Morton; Zhang Longxi

Rojas-Jara, Carlos L. “Wifredo Lam’s ‘Jungle’: A Contextual Reading of the Image,” 1995.
Committee: Amelia Jones, Chairperson; Regina Stefaniak; Karl A. Taube

Ontiveros, Mario J. “Circumscribing Identities: Chicana Muralists and the Representation of Chicana Subjectivity,” 1994.
Committee: Amelia Jones, Chairperson; Alicia Arrizón; Jonathan W. Green; Erika Suderburg

Forman, Kurt R. “Postmodernity and the Death of Painting,” 1994.
Committee: Amelia Jones, Chairperson; Erika Suderburg; Jonathan Green

Rayfield, Elizabeth K. “Making Mankind’s Acquaintance: Sterographic Viewing and Colonial Domination,” 1994.
Committee: Amelia Jones, Chairperson; Jonathan Green; Marguerite Waller

Meyer, Laura D. “The ‘Essential’ Judy Chicago: Central Core Imagery and the Language of Fetishism in Womanhouse and The Dinner Party,” 1994.
Committee: Amelia Jones, Chairperson; Steven Ostrow; Carole-Anne Tyler

Leonard, Deirdre C. “The Representaion of Meiji Japan in the Photographic Work of Kusakabe Kimbei,” 1994.
Committee: Amelia Jones, Chairperson; Jonathan Green; Ginger Hsü

McCarroll, Stacey S. “Fixing an Image of Florence Henri: The New Woman, the Avant-Garde, and Photography in the Early Twentieth Century,” 1994.
Committee: Amelia Jones, Chairperson; Jonathan W. Green; Judith G. Coffin

Fortunati, Allegra. “David as Penitent, David as Pope: An Interpretation of Francesco Salviati’s Fresco Cycle of the Life of King David for the Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti in Rome Within Its Cultural Context,” 1994.
Committee: Regina Stefaniak, Chairperson; Loren Patridge; Brian Copenhaver

Surber, Robin F. “Michael Graves: San Juan Capistrano Public Library,” 1993.
Committee: Derickson Brinkerhoff, Chairperson; Françoise Forster-Hahn; Thomas Pelzel

Terry, Shauna. “Domestic Visions: The Relationship of Arthur Hughes’ Illustrations to George MacDonald’s Fairy Tales,” 1993.
Committee: Françoise Forster-Hahn, Chairperson; Robert N. Essick; Steven F. Ostrow

MacCaskey, Laura. “The Zuccari Coronation of the Virgin: An Interpretation of the High Altarpiece of San Lorenzo in Damaso in Rome within its Cultural Context,” 1993.
Committee: Regina Stefaniak; Dale V. Kent; Steven F. Ostrow

Bailey, Michelle A. “Utopian Visions: An Inquiry into the Social and Artistic Theories that Inspired Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane and the Bauhaus Book Series,” 1993.
Committee: Françoise Forster-Hahn, Chairperson; Amelia Jones; Heidi Gilpin

Fiacco, Lori L. “The Emperor’s New Clothes: A Critical Analysis,” 1992.
Committee: Françoise Forster-Hahn, Co-Chairperson; Sally Stein, Co-Chairperson; Erika Suderburg; Jonathan W. Green

Flores, Nadine M. “Galka Scheyer Collection in Pasadena,” 1992.
Committee: Françoise Forster-Hahn; Thomas Pelzel; Theda Shapiro

Walsh, Gregory W. “The Mangrove Coast in Context: Walker Evans and the Photographic Book,” 1992.
Committee: Sally Stein, Co-Chairperson; Françoise Forster-Hahn, Co-Chairperson; Jonathan W. Green

Karthaus-Hunt, Beatrix. “Posters of the American Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1911-1917,” 1992.
Committee: Françoise Forster-Hahn, Co-Chairperson; Sally A. Stein, Co-Chairperson; Amelia Jones

Koeninger, Betty Kathryn. “Theodore Robinson’s La Débâcle,1892: An American Artist in France,” 1992.
Committee: Dericksen Brinkerhoff, Chairperson; Gerald M. Ackerman; Marjorie L. Harth

Perbetsky, Patricia A. “The Ferus Gallery 1957-1961,” 1991.
Committee: Sally Stein, Co-Chairperson; Françoise Forster-Hahn, Co-Chairperson; William Bradshaw

Miyagawa, Stacy L. “Imagining the Orient: Francis Frith’s Views of Egypt and the Middle East,” 1991.
Committee: Françoise Forster-Hahn; Thomas Pelzel; Sally Stein

Hamara, Heather J. “The Wilton Diptych: Propaganda or Prophecy,” 1991.
Committee: Regina Stefaniak, Chairperson; Dericksen Brinkerhoff; Theda Shapiro