Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Art of the United States
Dissertations in Progress by Subject, 2005

Show completed dissertations

Abbott, Janet, “The Barnett Aden Gallery: A Home for Diversity in a Segregated City” (Penn State, J. Robinson)

Addonizio, Shari, “Charismatic Masters, Serious Young Men, and Angels under White Umbrellas: The Summer Art Schools at Magnolia, Shinnecock, and Provincetown” (Florida State, K. Bearor)

Anderson, Sherman Reed, “An Epic of the American Farm: James Ormsbee Chapin and the Marvin Paintings” (Kansas, C. Eldredge)

Applegate, Heidi, “Staging Modernism at the 1915 San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition” (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

Atkins, Ashley, “Winslow Homer and Aestheticism in the United States” (Rutgers, W. Bellion)

Backer, Matthew, “Designs on the Future: Popularizing Modernity in America through Futuristic Style, 1920–1940” (Indiana, Bloomington, S. Burns)

Ball, Jeffrey, “The Missouri State Capitol: Architecture, Mural Painting, and Sculptural Decoration” (Missouri, Kansas City, O. Overby)

Barrett, Ross, “Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Visual Culture” (Boston, P. Hills)

Berkowitz, Ellie Patricia, “Innovation through Appropriation as an Alternative to Separatism: The Use of Commercial Imagery by Chicano Artists, 1960–1990” (UT Austin, A. Malagamba)

Boettcher, Graham, “Domestic Violence: Familial and Political Conflict in the Work of Emanuel Leutze” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Boone, Jobyl, “The Spectacle in the Art of the United States after 1967” (University of Delaware, A. Gibson)

Buckner, Cindy, “The Etching Revival in Late Nineteenth-Century America and Its Role in Aesthetic Education” (CUNY, S. Webster)

Buhler, Doyle L, “William Jacob Hays: Wildlife Painter in Nineteenth-Century New York” (Iowa, J. Kinsey)

Burgess, Lana A., “Advancing American Art: Survival of an Idea” (Florida State, K. Bearor)

Burt, Sarah, “Joesph Worchester and the Church of the New Jerusalem: Creating a Bay-Area Aesthetic” (Kansas, C. Eldredge)

Caro, Julie Levin, “The Early Career of Allan Rohan Crite (1930–1950)” (UT Austin, L. Henderson and C. Smith)

Chung, Nogin, “Picturing American Women in the Postwar Period” (Minnesota, K. A. Marling)

Copeland, Huey, “Bound to Appear: Site, Subjection, and the Disfiguration of Slavery in Multicultural America” (UC Berkeley, A. Wagner)

Costello, Eileen Elizabeth, “Between the Easel and the Mural: The Dissolution of Abstract Expressionist Painting into the Realm of Architecture” (UT Austin, R. Shiff)

Coyle, Heather Campbell, “Having Fun with Art: Pranks, Performances, and Parody in American Art Schools, 1890–1915” (Delaware, M. Leja)

Curtiss, Kimberly, “Making Red Skins White: The Construction of Racial and Cultural Identity through Paintings and Photographs of the Native American, 1800–1900” (Rutgers, W. Bellion)

Dasch, Rowena Houghton, “Charles Bird King: Artist-Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century America” (UT Austin, S. Rather)

De Armendi, Nicole, “Shifting Perception: Labyrinths and the Rise of Phenomenology in American Art of the 1960s and 1970s” (Virginia Commonwealth, R. Hobbs)

Deming, Diane, “Wasteland Poetics on the Western Frontier: Visualizing the Environment of the Great Basin” (Delaware, A. Gibson)

Diaz, Eva, “Chance and Design: Experimental Art at Black Mountain College” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Dolan, Julia, “‘I Will Take You into the Heart of Modern Industry’: Lewis Hine's Photographic Interpretation of the Machine Age” (Boston, K. Sichel)

Dooley, Michael C., “Citizen Bird: American Ornithological Art of the Progressive Era and the Beginnings of the Bird Conservation Movement” (Iowa, J. Kinsey)

Dossin, Catherine Julie Marie, “The Decade without a Definition: Narratives of Art History and the 1980s” (UT Austin, R. Shiff and K. Arens)

Durham, Dennis, “N.E. Thing Co. in Vancouver (1965–1978): Defining Conceptual Art on the Periphery” (Virginia Commonwealth, R. Hobbs)

Edwards, Katie Robinson, “Raising and Lowering Brows: Jackson Pollock in the Cultural Context of 1940s America” (UT Austin, R. Shiff)

Egan, Shannon, “An American Art: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, 1907–1930” (Johns Hopkins, B. Doherty)

Ellis, Amy, “‘Not a Mere Leaf-Painter’: Thomas Cole and the Figure” (Columbia, J. Crary, E. Hutchinson)

Evans, Yates, “Doors and Windows: Eastern Philosophy and Western Aesthetics in the Art of Ray Johnson” (Virginia Commonwealth, R. Hobbs)

Fort, Megan, “Archibald and Alexander Robertson and the Columbian Academy of Painting, New York, 1791–1841” (CUNY, S. Webster)

Gaston, Deborah, “Immigration, Ethnicity, and the Early Drawings of Joseph Stella, 1896–1924” (Delaware, W. Homer)

Gephart, Emily, “Symbolism, Modernism and the Work of Arthur B. Davies” (MIT, C. Jones)

Gerhold, Emily, “American Beauties: The Breast in American Art and Culture” (Virginia Commonwealth, E. Garberson)

Gieskes, Mette, “Games, Systems, and Structuralist Politics in European and American Art, 1960–1975” (UT Austin, R. Shiff)

Gilbert, Christopher, “American Art and Language during the Period of the Fox (1974–1976)” (Virginia Commonwealth, R. Hobbs)

Gillespie, Sarah Kate, “Samuel F. B. Morse and the Daguerreotype: Art and Science in American Culture, 1835–1855” (CUNY, K. Manthorne)

Glahn, Philip, “Estrangement and Politicization: Bertolt Brecht and Postwar American Art” (CUNY, R. Golan)

Glesmann, Amanda, “Living Histories: Photography and the Artistic Interior in Late Nineteenth-Century America” (Stanford, W. Corn)

Glick, Paula F., “Paul Sample: Regionalist Artist” (Columbia, J. Beck)

Gopinath, Gabrielle, “Ray Johnson and the U.S. Mail” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

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

Greene, Nikki, “The Rhythm of Glue, Grease and Grime: Body and Indexicality in the Works of Romare Bearden, David Hammons and Renye Stout” (Delaware, A. Gibson)

Greenhill, Jennifer, “‘the Plague of Jocularity’: Art, Humor, and the American Social Body, 1863–1906” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Groves, Laura, “Lilly Martin Spencer and Popular Prints” (Maryland, S. Promey)

Guglielmo, Antoniette, “Work-Bench of American Taste: Richard F. Bach, the Department of Industrial Relations, and Consumerism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1917–1940” (UC Santa Barbara, E. B. Robertson)

Hack, Brian, “American Acropolis: George Grey Barnard's Monument to Democracy, 1918–1938” (CUNY, S. Webster)

Hagood, Martha, “Representing the Truth: Realism, Sensationalism, and the Progressive Era Picture Press, 1902–1913” (Delaware, W. Homer)

Hamill, Sarah, “David Smith in Two Dimensions: Sculpture, Photography, and Space” (UC Berkeley, A. Wagner)

Hatch, Kevin, “Looking for Bruce Conner: Assemblage, Films, Drawings, 1957–1967” (Princeton, H. Foster)

Haxall, Daniel, “Politics, Form, and Identity in Abstract Expressionist Collage” (Penn State, S. Rich)

Henson, Dennis, “Beyond Warhol's 15 Minutes: Pop Art, Pop Music, ‘the Media’ and Fame” (Missouri, Kansas City, J. Klein)

Heyrman, Joy, “Signature Drawing: Collecting Artists' ‘Autographs’ in Antebellum America” (Maryland, College Park, S. Promey)

Holt, Keith M., “Cruise Control: Filling Station, Gay Male Artists and Audiences” (UC Santa Barbara, E. B. Robertson)

Hyde, Kimberly, “Louis C. Tiffany and the Business of Art” (Case Western Reserve, H. Adams)

Ikegami, Hiroko, “1964: Robert Rauschenberg and the Beginnings of Globalization in Modern Art” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Ikemoto, Wendy, “Double Vision: Pendant Painting in Antebellum America” (Harvard, J. Roberts)

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

Jones, Penny, “Figural Trees: American Artists and Forest Debate in the Nineteenth Century” (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

Jung, Eun Young, “The Legacies of Marcel Duchamp and Vladimir Tatlin in Dan Flavin's Fluorescent Light Installation in the 1960s” (UIUC, J. Fineberg)

Kaps, Nanni, “Similarities of Form and Concept in American and German 19th Century Landscape Painting” (Columbia, B. Novak)

Karpinskaia, Natalia, “Landscape Art and Landscape Attitudes in Russia and America” (Columbia, B. Novak)

Kelly, Sarah, “Camera's Lens and Mind's Eye: Whistler and the Science of Art” (Columbia, D. Rosand)

Kiefer, Evelyn, “The Birth and Death of the American Dining Room: An Evolution from the Colonial Hall to Frank Lloyd Wright's Dining Rooms and Beyond” (Case Western Reserve, H. Adams)

Kilbane, Nora, “A Tug from the Jug: Drink and Drinking in 19th-Century American Genre Painting” (Ohio State, B. Groseclose)

Kjaer, Lise, “Awakening the Spiritual: James Turrell and Quaker Practice” (CUNY, H. Senie)

Knappe, Stephanie, “Land of Lincoln: The Sixteenth President in Interwar Culture and Collective Memory” (Kansas, C. Eldredge)

Knox, Page, “Scribner's Monthly/The Century: A Vehicle of Aesthetic Thought in Late-Nineteenth-Century America” (Columbia, E. Hutchinson)

Koh, Dong-Yeon, “Larry Rivers and Frank O'Hara: Reframing Male Subjectivity” (CUNY, A. Chave)

Kohn, Adrian Michael, “Seeing Los Angeles Minimalism 1958–1972” (UT Austin, R. Shiff)

Kresser, Katie, “Art as History, History as Art: John La Farge and the Problem of Representation, 1859–1910” (Harvard, J. Roberts)

Kroiz, Lauren, “Modernizing ‘A Grey Race’: American Art during the Era of Exclusion (1882–1943)” (MIT, C. Jones)

Kuebler-Wolf, Elizabeth, “The Perfect Shadow of His Master: Proslavery in American Visual Culture, 1780–1920” (Indiana, Bloomington, S. Burns)

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

Kusserow, Karl, “Picturing Power: Portraiture and Its Uses in the New York Chamber of Commerce” (Yale, J. Prown)

Lamuniere, Michelle, “The Social Museum at Harvard: Francis Greenwood Peabody and Early Twentieth-Century Social Reform Photography in Context” (Boston, K. Sichel)

Lasser, Ethan, “Figures in the Grain: Sentient Objects in Anglo-America, 1660–1800” (Yale, E. Cooke Jr.)

Lawrence, James Alexander, “Abdication in an Artistic Democracy: Meaning in the Work of Barnett Newman and Donald Judd, 1950–1970 (and Thereafter)” (UT Austin, R. Shiff)

Lawton, Saadia, “Representing the Representative: Visual Binaries of the Wedgwood Slave Medallion, 1787–1887” (Wisconsin, Madison, A. Andrzejewski)

Lee, Kee-Lee, “Sur Vampyr: Theresa Hak Kyang Cha and the Cultural Para-Sites of the Korean Diaspora” (UNC Chapel Hill, C. Mavor)

Lessing, Lauren Keach, “Presiding Divinities: American Ideal Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century Domestic Interiors” (Indiana, Bloomington, S. Burns)

Levine, Cary, “Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, Paul McCarthy” (CUNY, R. Golan)

Longwell, Alicia, “John Graham and the Quest for an American Art in the 1920s and 1930s” (CUNY, K. Manthorne)

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

Marie, Annika, “The Most Radical Act: Working toward a Materialist Aesthetic in Theodor Adorno, Harold Rosenberg, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt” (UT Austin, R. Shiff, A. Reynolds)

Mauro, Hayes Pete, “Bodies in Motion: Sport, Labor, and Athleticism in American Art and Culture, 1865–1918” (CUNY, K. Manthorne)

Mayer, Stephanie, “The Art of The Gift: Mount, Sully, Huntington, and the Antebellum Gift Book Industry” (Boston, P. Hills)

McGuire, Heather, “John Baldessari: Blasted Allegories” (Virginia Commonwealth, R. Hobbs)

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

Miller, Sarah M., “Inventing ‘Documentary’ in American Photography, 1930–1945” (Chicago, J. Snyder)

Monahan, Anne, “Form and Content—Politics and Figuration in American Art of the 1960's” (Delaware, A. Gibson)

Moss, Dorothy, “Recasting the Copy: Original Paintings and Reproductions at the Dawn of American Mass Culture, c. 1900” (Delaware, M. Leja)

Murayama, Nina, “Furniture/Design and Minimalism: Richard Artschwager, Donald Judd, and Scott Burton” (CUNY, A. Chave)

Murphy, Jessica, “Portraiture and Feminine Identity in the Stieglitz Circle: Agnes Ernst Meyer, Katharine Rhoades, and Marion Beckett” (Delaware, M. Werth)

Murphy, Joni, “Coyote Tales: Stereotypes, Politics, and Humor in the Art of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith” (Kansas, D. Cateforis)

Murphy, Michael, ‘White Collared’: Fashioning Masculinity in American Visual Culture” (Washington University, A. Miller)

Neil, Jonathan, “Carl Andre, Richard Serra, the Problem of Materials, and the Picture of Matter” (Columbia, B. Buchloh, R. Krauss)

Nelson, Andrea, “Reading Montage: The Photography Books of László Moholy-Nagy and Walker Evans” (Minnesota, J. Blocker)

Nigro, Carol, “Cy Twombly's Italian Journey: Histories and Myths for a Modern Era” (Delaware, A. Gibson)

Nowicki, Susan, “Montclair, New Jersey: The Development of a Suburban Town and Its Architecture” (CUNY, K. Murphy)

Nygard, Travis, “Visualizing Agriculture in Midwestern America and Canada, 1922–1945” (Pittsburgh, K. Savage)

Oshima, Tetsuya, “The Figure Reemerging: Jackson Pollock's Cut-Out Series, 1948–1956” (CUNY, G. Levin)

Osman, Michael, “Regulation in the Architecture of American Modernism, 1890–1920” (MIT, M. Jarzombek)

Peabody, Rebecca, “A Strategic Cut: Kara Walker's Art and Imagined Race in American Visual Culture” (Yale, R. Thompson, H. Carby)

Peariso, Craig, “Re/Citing: Radical Activism in Late 1960s America” (SUNY Stony Brook, J. Katz)

Perchuk, Andrew, “Mapping the Surface: Art and Modernism in Los Angeles, 1962–1972” (C. Wood)

Phillips, Ruth Anne, “Pre-Columbian Appropriation: Ancient American Influence in U.S. Architecture, 1910–1940” (CUNY, J. Sund)

Poor, Natasha, “Dirty Art: Transgressing Domesticity and the Body in 1950s United States Art” (CUNY, A. Chave)

Portnoy, Scott, “Abstraction Reduced: The Monochrome in American Painting, 1949–1963” (Columbia, B. Buchloh)

Powers, Sarah, “Images of Tension: The Urban and Rural Divide in the Work of Charles Sheeler, Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton” (Delaware, A. Gibson and Pennsylvania, M. Leja)

Price, Justine Dana, “Critical Distinctions: Attitudes towards American Abstraction, 1936–1952” (UT Austin, R. Shiff)

Pultz, Janet, “Christian Abrahamsen (1887–1983), Norwegian-American Portrait Painter” (Missouri, Kansas City, O. Overby)

Raab, Jennifer, “Frederic Church and the Culture of Detail: Memory, Forgetting, and Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Reece-Hughes, Shirley, “The Art of David Bates” (Kansas, C. Eldredge)

Reymond, Rhonda, “For Glory and for Beauty: Richard Morris Hunt, George Washington Vanderbilt, and All Souls' Church” (Georgia, J. Simon)

Reynolds, Rebecca L., “Sculpture Parks, Sculpture Gardens, and Site-Specific Practices in the U.S., 1965–1991” (Chicago, M. Ward)

Roeder, Katherine, “Cultivating Dreamfulness: Fantasy, Longing, and Commodity Culture in the Work of Winsor McCay” (Delaware, M. Leja)

Roethke, Leigh, “A Passion for Spain: Españolismo in American Visual Culture” (Minnesota, K. A. Marling)

Rosenbaum, Sarah, “In the Public Domain: Public Art, Advanced Capitalism, and the Contemporary City” (Harvard, Y-A. Bois)

Ross, Zachary, “The Eclectic Ideal: Edwin Austin Abbey's Murals at the Pennsylvania State Capitol, Harrisburg” (CUNY, S. Webster)

Rottner, Nadja, “Claes Oldenburg, 1959–1966: The Violence of Sensation” (Columbia, B. Buchloh, R. Krauss)

Rundquist, Leisa, “Firestorms and Conflagrations: The Inflamed Cosmology of Henry Darger” (UNC Chapel Hill, C. Mavor)

Sailor, Rachel M., “Meaningful Places: Nineteenth Century Photography and the Local Landscapes of the American West” (Iowa, J. Kinsey)

Samuel, Anne, “Rethinking Vision in the American Renaissance Murals of Edwin Howland Blashfield” (Delaware, M. Leja)

Schulman, Daniel, “African American Art and Artists in Chicago, 1893–1945” (IFA/NYU, R. Storr)

Sean, Rowe, “Figuring the Landscape: Western Monuments and the Contested Terrain of American National Nostalgia” (UC Irvine, C. Whiting)

Senf, Rebecca, “Intimate Places: Ansel Adams's Photographs in the American West and Southwest, 1916–1936” (Boston, K. Sichel)

Scanlon, Patricia Smith, “‘God-gifted girls’: Women Illustrators, Gender, Class, and Commerce in American Visual Culture, 1885–1925” (Indiana, Bloomington, S. Burns)

Shane, Robert, “Hans Hofmann and Einfühlung” (SUNY Stony Brook, D. Kuspit)

Sherry, Karen, “Exposing the ‘Natural’ Woman: Female Bodies in American Visual Culture, 1785 to 1830” (Delaware, M. Leja)

Sinnett, Gretchen, “Rites of Passage: Envisioning Female Adolescence in Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century American Painting” (Pennsylvania, E. Johns, S. Sidlauskas)

Sivard, Susan, “The Volcano in European and American Art, 1770–1865” (Columbia, B. Novak)

Slifkin, Robert, “Out of Time: Philip Guston's Marlborough Exhibition and the Refiguration of Post-War American Art” (Yale, A. Nemerov)

Smith, Caroline, “American Artists' Frames: Paintings, Environments, and Viewers” (UC Santa Barbara, E. B. Robertson)

Smith, Jerry, “Auto-America: The Automobile and American Art, ca. 1900–1950” (Kansas, C. Eldredge)

Smith, Laura, “The Art of Horace Poolaw, Kiowa, Photographer” (Indiana, Bloomington, S. Burns)

Snook, Sarah, “The Development of the American Art Market in Antebellum New York” (Columbia, D. Rosand)

Strahl-Allen, Lisa, “Gender Construction and Manifestation in the Art of Elaine de Kooning” (Temple, G. Silk)

Stamey, Emily, “Pop, Place, and Personal Identity in the Art of Roger Shimomura” (Kansas, D. Cateforis, C. Eldredge)

Thrush, Nanette, “Tilting at History: Gothic Revival Tournaments in Early Victorian Great Britain and the Antebellum American South” (Indiana, Bloomington, S. Burns)

Towns, Elizabeth, “Wondrous Creatures: The Hummingbird and Orchid Paintings of Martin Johnson Heade” (UNC Chapel Hill, C. Mavor)

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

Twa, Lindsay, “Troubling Island: The Imagining and Imaging of Haiti by African-American Artists” (UNC Chapel Hill, M. Harris)

Van Horn, Jennifer, “The Object of Civility and the Art of Politeness in British America” (Virginia, M. McInnis)

Vincenti, Marissa, “Our Spiritual Strivings: Gurdjieffian Philosophy, Spiritualism and Politics in the Art of Aaron Douglas” (Duke, R. Powell)

Witt, Susan, “The Gendered Language of War: Visual Rhetoric and Cultural Power in Civil War America” (Stanford, B. Wolf)

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

Woltz, Katherine, “ Framing the New Republic: History Painting and Cultural Politics in the Early American Republic, 1786–1826” (Virginia, M. McInnis)

Yoshida, Atsushi, “Modern Eremites: Art and the Vocation of Withdrawal in Gilded Age America” (Washington University, A. Miller)

Zarro, Jennifer, “Images of the American City: Maps, Prints, and Magazine Views, 1780–1800” (Rutgers, W. Bellion)

Zygmont, Bryan J., “Portraiture and Politics in New York City, 1790–1825: Stuart, Vanderlyn, Trumbull, and Jarvis” (Maryland, College Park, S. Promey)