Graduate Students

Patricia Blessing focuses on Islamic architecture and archaeology of the Middle Ages. Her dissertation on architecture in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century eastern Anatolia develops around questions of Seljuk versus Ilkhanid patronage and the relationship between Islamic, Byzantine, and Caucasian traditions of building. Patricia also works on Byzantine architecture and on the transfer and authentication of relics in East and West. She has excavated in Syria, Uzbekistan, and Turkey.

Annie Bourneuf is a Ph.D. candidate working on a dissertation titled "The Visible and the Legible: On Paul Klee's Work and Reception, 1916-1922." Forthcoming and recent publications include "A Speculative Tapestry: Gunta Stölzl's Slit-Tapestry Red-Green" in the Modell Bauhaus exhibition catalogue (Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 2009), "Paul Klee's Grids and the Ends of Reading at the Bauhaus" in Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse, and Modernism, ed. Robin Schuldenfrei and Jeffrey Saletnik (Routledge, 2009), and translations of Walter Benjamin, "Bekränzter Eingang" and "Antoine Wiertz: Gedanken und Gesichte eines Geköpften" in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Harvard University Press, 2008). She has received grants and fellowships from the Dedalus Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Her current research interests include Cubism, German art in the 1910s and 1920s, and concepts of reading in relation to the visual arts.

Alexis Helena Cohen studies modern architectural history with particular interest in the late 18th and 19th centuries. She received her B.A. from the University of Toronto in 2006.

Giada Damen is a graduate student in Renaissance art who works with Professor Patricia Fortini Brown. Her field of study is the Italian Renaissance, with particular attention to the art, culture, ideas and society of the XV century. She is currently working on her dissertation, focusing on the trade in antiquities between Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean during the XV and XVI centuries.

Leslie Geddes specializes in Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture. Her dissertation, Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Water, examines Leonardo’s lifelong investigation of water within a context of emergent artistic and technical modes of representation in early modern Italy. Her research interests include cartography, urban planning, and hydraulics, and how art intersects with scientific developments: from fortifications to fountains to print culture. She received her B.A. in art history from Columbia University in 2001 and her M.A. from Princeton in 2008.

Victoria Goldman, a fifth-year student, received her B.A. in Art History from Barnard College in 2003.   Her dissertation is entitled "'The most beautiful Punchinelli in the world': the Punchinello drawings of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo."  It will provide a comprehensive exploration of the approximately forty drawings, and will consider such themes as Carnival, commedia dell'arte, caricature, and scatalogical imagery, as well as issues of connoisseurship.  Her advisor is Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann.
 

Michael Hatch studies the history of Chinese art under Professor Jerome Silbergeld. He has a BA from Middlebury College in East Asian Studies (2003). Prior to beginning his PhD studies at Princeton in 2008 he lived in Beijing for several years, where he worked in client relations and translation for a large Chinese-based auction house. He has written auction reviews for Orientations magazine, and reviews of contemporary Chinese art exhibitions for Yishu magazine, Artforum Online, and Artforum magazine. His primary research areas include classical literati painting and contemporary Chinese painting.

Johanna Heinrichs is in the field of Renaissance and Baroque art and focuses on architecture in Italy. Her dissertation examines the Renaissance suburb as a social and design concept, focusing on examples in the Veneto and Genoa. She earned her B.A. from Williams College in 2002 and an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, U.K., in 2004. Her master's thesis was entitled "Corpus Urbis: The Hospital of Santo Spirito and Sixtus IV's Renovation of Rome, 1471-1484."

Megan Heuer studies 20th century art and histories and theories of modernism. Her dissertation focuses on Fernand Léger and the intersections of film, painting, and architecture in his work in the 1920s. Her interests include psychoanalysis, cinema, marxist theory, and feminist and queer art history and theory. She received her B.A. from Yale (2000) and an M.A. in art history from Columbia (2006) where she wrote her thesis on the work of Eva Hesse, entitled "The Structure of Absurdity: Eva Hesse in Germany, 1964-65."

Anna Katz studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular interest in sculpture. Her dissertation is titled "Hybrid Species: Lee Bontecou's Sculpture and Works on Paper, 1958–1971." She received a B.A. in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 and was awarded an M.A. from Princeton in 2008.

Elizabeth J. Kessler-Dimin is a Classical Archaeologist writing her dissertation, I am the True Vine: Acculturation, Appropriation, and Assimilation in Religious Iconography of Late Antiquity, in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Elizabeth has taught at The College of New Jersey as an Adjunct Professor of Classical Greek and at The City College of New York as an Adjunct Professor of Art History. At Princeton, Elizabeth has led precepts for Art 101: History of Art from Antiquity to the Present and Art 202: Greek Art: Ideal Realism. She received a B.A., magna cum laude, in Classics from New York University (2003) and a M.A. in Classical Archaeology from Princeton University (2008). Elizabeth published “Tradition and Transmission: Hermes Kourotrophos in Nea Paphos, Cyprus” in Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World, Mohr Siebeck, 2008. She lectures regularly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Zoe Kwok specializes in the history of early Chinese painting. Her dissertation, Halls to Inhabit, Paths to Wander: Paintings of Court Women from the Five Dynasties (907 – 960), investigates the changing use of images of imperial women during the 10th century. Zoe’s other interests include 10th- 13th century genre painting, early textiles, Song Dynasty ceramics, and the representation of material culture in painting. She holds a B.A. in history and art history from Wellesley College and an A.M. in East Asian Studies from Harvard University.

Leigh Lieberman is a Classical Archaeologist working primarily on the Hellenic colonies of Sicily and Southern Italy. She received her B.A and her M.A. from The Johns Hopkins University in 2006 and 2007, respectively. Her Master’s Thesis, The Nature of the Cults at Poseidonia, focused on the development of the cults of Hera and Aphrodite in the South Italian colony, particularly as reflected by the terracotta figurines dedicated by worshippers at shrines both inside and outside the settlement’s walls. She has published part of a larger paper in The Art of Ancient Greece, a catalogue of the ancient collection in The Walters Art Museum. She has also presented papers at both the Archaeological Institute of America Conference and the Classical Association of the Middlewest and South Conference. She currently spends her summer seasons working as the Project Registrar for the Pompeii Archaeological Research Project: Porta Stabia excavation (PARP:PS).

Emma Ljung's dissertation in Classical Archaeology “From Indemnity to Integration: An Economic Study of Aitolia in the 2nd and 1st Century BC” sits at the intersections of literature, material culture and economic theory. Primarily focusing on the Hellenistic/Roman republican world, Emma’s current research interests include Greek and Roman political architecture, travel and movement, economics, production and technology. She has published on Greek kilns, Italian terra sigillata and British 20th century children’s literature, and has dug big holes in all corners of the Mediterranean. At Princeton, Emma has led precepts in ART 100 Introduction to Art History as well as ART 290 The Art & Archaeology of Ancient Egypt in addition to having taught courses on a wide range of topics both at UC Berkeley and at her alma mater. Emma received a BA in Classical Archaeology & Ancient History with a concentration in Classical Languages from Lunds Universitet (summa cum laude, 2003) and a MA in Classical Archaeology from Princeton University (2007). She is the recipient of several international research grants, most recently from the Gad Rausing Foundation. In her spare time, she trains dressage horses. She loves Livy.

Matthew J. Milliner studied art history at Wheaton College (IL), and after earning an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, came to the University to study Byzantine art with Professor Slobodan Ćurčić. His dissertation, The Virgin of the Passion: Development, Dissemination, and Afterlife of a Byzantine Icon Type, is tracing the twelfth-century origin and worldwide expansion of what has been called "the most popular icon of the twentieth century." In addition to his research, he leads frequent tours of the Princeton University Chapel and is the workshop coordinator for the Mount Menoikeion Seminar at the Hagios Ioannis Prodromos Monastery near Serres, Greece.

Jennifer Morris’ field of study is the Renaissance in Northern and Central Europe.  Her research interests include the Reformation and the interplay between art, religion, and economics in the early modern period.

Kate Nesin is at work on her dissertation, "Twombly's Things: The Sculptures of Cy Twombly." Her research interests cover modern and contemporary sculpture, medium and genre boundaries, categories of objecthood, the relevance of a phenomenological approach, and ways in which description can disrupt narrative. Kate has published previously on the sculpture of Richard Serra. Forthcoming publications also include "Some Notes on Words and Things in Cy Twombly's Sculptural Practice," in the journal Tate Papers (Fall 2008); "The Recentness of Richard Serra's Sculpture," in Richard Serra: Recent Work (Gagosian London: 2008); and "Thinking Small(ness) Sculpturally," in the journal Pidgin (Fall/Winter 2008–9).

Abigail Newman received her B.A. from Brown University in 2006. She studies Northern Renaissance and Baroque art, with a particular focus on the art of the South Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Jessica Paga is a Classical Archaeologist, working primarily on the architecture of Greece in the Archaic and Classical periods. Her dissertation, Architectural Agency and the Construction of Athenian Democracy, explores the intersections of the built environment and political change during the late sixth and early fifth centuries B.C.E. She has published an article, "Bronze Age Fortifications: A Dualistic Interpretation," in Montage (2007), the online journal of the Graduate Art History Society of the University of Iowa, and recently reviewed Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Greece for the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR 2009.05.45). Her most recent article, "Mapping Politics: An Exploration of Deme Theatres in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.," is currently under review by Hesperia - a preliminary version can be found on the Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics website. Jessica also works on Greek sculpture, Bronze Age fortifications and buildings, and Greek ritual. She has excavated at the Agora in Athens, at Polis Chrysochous in Cyprus, and at Argilos in northern Greece. She received her B.A. from Smith College in 2005.

Christina Papadimitriou focuses on aspects of modern and contemporary Architecture. She has previously received a Master’s degree from the Architectural Association in London. She holds a Diploma in Architecture from the University of Patras (Greece) and a Diploma in Art and Archaeology from the University of Athens (Greece).

Joanna Papayiannis is a doctoral candidate in the field of Classical Art and Archaeology. Her dissertation, The Gynaikonitis: An Investigation of (Un)Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Houses, examines the use of spatial divisions and gender-specific space in Classical and Hellenistic domestic architecture.  Joanna’s others interests include ancient Greek city planning, colonization, women and gender studies.  She has excavated in Northern Greece and in the Cyclades.  Joanna received her B.A. in Classics and Classical Civilization from the University of Toronto in 2003.

Elizabeth Petcu is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Art & Archaeology. Her primary research interests include the architecture and urbanism of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Central Europe, gift exchange between courts, and the role of ephemeral architecture in urban centers such as Vienna, Prague, Munich, and Dresden during the early modern period. She received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in 2008.

Susannah Rutherglen studies Renaissance art, with an emphasis on Venetian painting and architecture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  Her research focuses on Giorgione and the emergence of the Renaissance cabinet picture, considering works such as the Tempesta within a continuous tradition of ornamental paintings for cupboards, bedsteads, and musical instruments.  Susannah lived and worked in Venice during academic year 2006-2007.  She received her B.A. in art history from Yale University in 2003.

Nebojša Stanković is a PhD Candidate in the fields of Early Christian, Byzantine, and Medieval art and architecture. His main interests are Byzantine and Medieval art and architecture in relation to liturgy and ritual, as well as monastic architecture. His dissertation – “Framing Monastic Ritual: Architecture and Liturgy of the Byzantine Narthexes on Mount Athos” –examines the relationship between monastic rites performed in the narthex and architectural form and functional organization of this part of the church. He is also interested in the romantic and idealistic in modern architecture.

His recent contributions are “Middle- and Late-Byzantine Monastic Ossuaries: Architecture, Liturgical Function, and Meaning,” in Thirty-Second Annual Byzantine Studies Conference, November 10-12, 2006: Abstracts (Saint Louis MO, 2006): 12-13, and several entries for the Encyclopaedia of the Hellenic World, Volume 3: Constantinople (Athens, Greece, 2008). He has taken part in several archaeological projects in Serbia, Greece, and Turkey. Stanković holds an M.Arch. from the University of Belgrade - School of Architecture (Serbia), and a post-graduate degree in Architectural Preservation from the University of Bologna (Italy).

Adedoyin Teriba is an architectural historian seeking to understand how sacred and secular architecture evolved in South-West Nigeria in the last 200 years. He received his B'Arch from Federal University of Technology Minna, Nigeria in 1999 and M'Arch from the University of Oklahoma in 2004.