Department of Art History

The Department of Art History welcomes our 2020-2021 incoming class of PhD Students:

Trevor Brandt studies the material culture of immigration and multi-sensory objects within the domestic sphere. His research blends visual and material culture through interdisciplinary methodologies to study early American print objects and their roles within household spaces. Trevor was previously the curator of the American Swedish Historical Museum in Philadelphia, where he curated exhibitions on folk textiles, mid-century glass, and the illustrator Gustaf Tenggren. He received his MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture and his BA from the Pennsylvania State University. His forthcoming chapter within an edited volume (De Gruyter) examines a genre of printed historical prayer objects from German-American communities. He will join us as a Neubauer Family Distinguished Doctoral Fellow.

Cole Gruber is a PhD student working at the intersection of art history, theory, and historiography. Many of his objects of study present themselves as limit cases to the discipline of art history—things that straddle, whether intentionally or not, the amorphous boundary between art and non-art. In particular, Cole finds himself drawn to artworks often placed within the twentieth century’s “conceptual” tradition as well as to the fascinating collection of candidates for the world’s oldest art objects—usually a few small marks in stone or bone made tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago by the hands of various non extant species of the Homo genus. Cole received his BA from the University of Chicago and his MA from Williams College.

Salimeh Hosseini is a Ph.D. student studying the history of Islamic art and material culture. Her research interests include pre-modern Islamic ceramics, materiality, epigraphy, economic and cultural aspects of the mobility of objects. She holds two BAs, in Archaeology and Persian Literature, from the University of Tehran and an MA in humanities from the University of Chicago. For her MA thesis, she worked on a series of diagrams in a 17th-century Arabic Sufi manuscript. Since the summer of 2019, she has also been working as a curatorial intern of Islamic art at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Yan Jin is a PhD student in East Asian art history, focusing on the material culture of late imperial China. Her research interests include cross-regional exchanges, negotiations between global and local artistic traditions, objects and agency. Yan received her BA in Art History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and her MA from the University of Chicago with a thesis on glass mirror table screens in Emperor Qianlong’s court.

Alan Longino is a Ph.D. student studying postwar Japanese conceptual art and global contemporary art. His research considers a telepathic & post-verity mode of communication between information systems and image production. Previously, he co-curated the exhibition, Yutaka Matsuzawa, at Yale Union (2019, with Reiko Tomii), and re-published the artist’s 1988 manuscript, Quantum Art Manifesto, for the first time outside of Japan. He has contributed essays and exhibition texts for artists, museums, and galleries, and his art criticism has appeared in such publications as Heichi, Artforum, and the Haunt Journal of Art (UC Irvine). Alongside his academic research, Alan was a founding member of Wendy’s Subway, a library, writing space, and independent publisher in Brooklyn, NY, and has worked in galleries such as Jan Kaps, Cologne, and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.

Bianca Passalacqua-Thon is from San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she completed her Bachelor’s degree in Art History with an emphasis on Modern Art at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. Bianca focused her undergrad thesis on the German artist Hannah Höch, specifically her Ethnographic Museum photomontage series, which surveys various overlaps between colonial artifacts, the woman’s body, and Modern Art. Shortly after obtaining her BA, she was awarded the Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Hispanic Serving-Institutions Bridge Scholarship through which she took several graduate courses at the University of Chicago. During the course of her graduate studies, Bianca hopes to continue researching Berlin Dada from an interdisciplinary perspective that deploys post-colonial and feminist theory, philosophy, Marxism, and literature.

Cybele Tom is interested in the trajectories of aging and obsolescence in objects, namely their immaterial and functional aspects. Her studies explore analogies between medieval and contemporary works of art. Prior to entering the doctoral program, Cybele worked as an objects conservator at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she specialized in the technical examination and care of polychrome sculpture. She has an MA from the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.