The Department of Art History

Savannah is a second-year doctoral student concentrating on sixteenth and seventeenth-century Mexico. She received a BA Magna Cum Laude with Honors in Art History and Religious Studies from the University of Iowa (2009) and a MA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2011). Her MA thesis examined the 1584 retable commission by the indigenous municipal council of Huexotzinco, Mexico.  Savannah’s research explores popular indigenous and African devotional practice, the construction of sacred spaces, death and disease, conversion, and religious imagery in colonial Mexico. Savannah recently completed an intensive summer course in Classical and Modern Nahuatl through the Zacatecas Institute for Teaching and Research in Ethnology (IDIEZ).

Rachel Jans is a doctoral candidate in Modern and Contemporary Art, with a focus on postwar German art. Her dissertation, “Art on the Border: Galerie René Block in 1960s and 70s Berlin and New York,” considers for the first time the pivotal role Block played in defining the conceptual importance of artists, consolidating art movements, and disseminating art through national and international networks. Several of the artists she considers in this context include Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Wolf Vostell, KP Brehmer, several Fluxus artists, and many others.

Further areas of interest include trans-Atlantic artistic exchange, German-German artistic relations during the Cold War, the politics of space, materiality, multiples, and German expressionism. Her research has been supported by a Fulbright scholarship and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. She is currently completing her dissertation with the support of a Whiting Dissertation-Year Fellowship. 

Max, who hails from Berlin (East), graduated from the London School of Economics (BSc, 2004) and the Courtauld Institute of Art (MA, 2006), where he studied German Romantic art with Professor Joseph Leo Koerner. He studies European art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a particular focus on the history of modern and contemporary German art.

Max’s dissertation project is a history of the Berlin-based art nouveau magazine PAN (1895-1900). He is investigating the innovative use of printing techniques, inaugurating a new age of image making. He hopes to illuminate in particular the impact it has on the emerging discourse of art history itself.

Max has also interned at the Art Institute of Chicago (Department of Contemporary Art), has written catalog essays, and is actively curating shows of contemporary art.

Ed began his academic life at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied printmaking before transferring to the University of Chicago and eventually earning his B.A. in “Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities” in 2008. After kicking around New York for a few years, he made a break for the woods of western Mass and got his M.A. at the Williams College Program in the History of Art in 2012. His qualifying paper, InFlux 1962, examined Fluxus’ attempts at self-definition in the context of contemporary shifts in the concept of history. Having since returned to Chicago as a doctoral candidate, he continues to be interested in the philosophy of history as well the relationships between theory and practice.

He is 8 feet tall and once kicked a football across Lake Erie.

Jesse received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 2008. She was awarded a 2008-09 T.J. Watson Fellowship for research in non-Western modern architecture and planned cities. Currently, her work is focused on early post-modern architecture and theories of unitary urbanism. Her research interests also include theories of ornamentation, revivals, Soviet material culture and design, pedagogy and the historiography of art and architecture.

Alexandra Marraccini received her BA from Yale University in History (2009), where she was a Bartels Fellow at the Yale Center for British Art and a recipient of the Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prize. She earned her MA in Medieval Studies at University of Toronto (2010-11), where she continued to work on book illustration as a locus of discourse about nature and the structure of natural knowledge.  Her research focuses on Late Medieval and Early Modern scientific images, particularly alchemical and medical material, in England, Scotland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Her interests in the field also include book history and manuscript studies, Late Antique material culture, and the historiography of art, particularly in Warburgian contexts. Currently, she is writing on the history of Hermetic-scientific images and diagrams, and her work on Elias Ashmole’s copies of the Ripley Scrolls is forthcoming in the journal Abraxas.

Tamar is pursuing a joint degree in the Department of Art-History and the Committee on Social Thought. She works on 19th-century French Art. Her dissertation project focuses on the drawings of Jacques-Louis David, and more broadly, on the functions of preparatory processes in early 19th century French painting. Tamar received her B.A. (Honors) from Tel-Aviv University, with a double major in art-history and in the interdisciplinary humanities program. She also studied in the New-York Studio School for Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, and has extensive training as a studio artist.

Quincy Ngan got his BA degree in the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2007. He is currently writing his doctoral dissertation on the Blue-and-Green Landscape painting (Qinglu shanshui) in Chinese art. He is particularly interested in the symbolic value of pigments and other materials in different socio-cultural contexts, the history Chinese landscape painting, and connoisseurship. Other than being one of the student editors of the university’s Digital Scrolling Paintings Project, Quincy also assists the Visual Resources Center in expanding its database with Chinese and Japanese materials.

Ann’s dissertation "Locating Identity: Mixed Inscriptions and Multiple Media in Greek Art, ca. 675-336 BCE" engages three categories of study: the relationship between word and image in Greek art; studies in Greek epigraphy; and issues of ethnic identity in the ancient Greek world. Her project critically examines a prevalent assumption that there exists a direct correlation between dialect, alphabet, and ethnicity in inscriptions. Broadly, she argues that artisans manipulated dialect and alphabet for rhetorical effect to evoke a variety of identities and meanings based on contexts and patterns of use. Ann is currently a Twelve-Month Chester-Dale Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.  Prior to graduate school, she worked in the Antiquities Department at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Martin studied Art History at the University of Vienna and specialized in medieval devotional art and illuminated manuscripts. He received his M.A. degree in 2009 with a thesis on the Strasbourg Exemplar. That same year, he was a graduate intern in the Manuscripts Department at the J. Paul Getty Museum and guest curated a manuscripts exhibition entitled "Heaven, Hell, and Dying Well: Images of Death in the Middle Ages," which opened in May 2012. Coinciding with the exhibit, his article "Visions of the Afterlife" (Apollo Magazine, May 2012) investigates visual representations of hell c. 1500 A.D.

Stephanie is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in modern Chinese and Japanese art. She received her B.A. in English Literature from National Chiao Tung University and her M.A. in Art History from National Central University in Taiwan. Her research interests include cultural exchanges between East Asia and Europe, discourses of modernism and transnationalism, and the Sino-Japanese relationship.

Her dissertation, "Imagining China," examines the politics of refashioning the past in early twentieth century Chinese and Japanese history painting. She explores how the visual representation of "China" as an idealized cultural identity became contested terrain for both Chinese and Japanese artists during this period of nation-building and self-redefinition.

Her articles have appeared in journals such as Modern Art Asia, Montage and the exhibition catalogue, Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints. She also serves as an editorial committee member of the book publication, Documents: Oil Painting in China, 1542-2000 (forthcoming). In 2012-2013, she is an exchange scholar at Waseda University in Tokyo.

Michael Tymkiw, who received his BA in French at Yale University and an MBA at the University of Chicago, is a PhD candidate specializing in 20th-century art and design. His dissertation explores issues of spectatorship within the context of National Socialist exhibition design. Prior to beginning his PhD research, Michael worked as a curatorial intern at the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art, where he curated three exhibitions. His writings have appeared in Word & Image, the Journal of Design History, and the Chicago Art Journal.

Kelli Robeson Wood is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Medieval and Early Modern Art. She is currently pursuing her dissertation "The Space of Play: Games in Early Modern Italy" under the direction of Rebecca Zorach, Niall Atkinson, and Aden Kumler. From October 2012 she is a Fulbright Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut.

Wood earned bachelor’s degrees with honors in Art History and Political Science at the University of Florida. She has advanced her research interests in medieval manuscripts and French and Italian Renaissance art through work on exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, Newberry Library, and Smart Museum of Art. Recently, Wood curated the exhibition "On the Edge: Medieval Margins and the Margins of Academic Life" at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center, visible also online at http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/webexhibits/ontheedge/. Her teaching interests include courses on Italian and Northern Renaissance Art, Medieval Art, Early Modern Architecture and Urban Space, History of the Book, Baroque Art, and Introduction to Art.

Jin received his BA in international politics from Renmin University of China. He then studied art history at Peking University and University of Virginia. His love of Dunhuang art and the Silk Road culture led him to major in art history.  Influenced by Li Song and Dorothy Wong, both of whom have served as his advisers in the MA programs, he has also been interested in Buddhist and Daoist steles of the Northern Dynasties. Now working with Wu Hung, he focuses his dissertation on sarcophagi of the sixth century China, which reflect major artistic trends of the time and include some unique sarcophagi made for ethnic Xianbei people and Sogdian immigrants.

Website: http://home.uchicago.edu/~lmz/Welcome.html

Lisa Zaher received her MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and her BA in English: Modern Studies from the University of Virginia.  Her dissertation, "By Mind and Hand: Hollis Frampton's Photographic Modernism" argues for a revised history of photographic modernism through the works of the American filmmaker, photographer, and theorist, Hollis Frampton.  Frampton's photographic practice, construed broadly, renders photographic production and reception an embodied, performative, and politically engaged endeavor.