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Graduate Student Profiles
Sinem is a PhD student studying early modern Muslim empires. She is especially interested in art and politics, collecting, and cultural exchange. Currently, she studies gift giving between the Ottomans and
Safavids in the 16th and 17th centuries. Before initially joining the program for an MA in 2004, Sinem completed BA degrees in sociology and history at Koc University, and an MA in history at Sabanci University in Istanbul.
Aditi is a doctoral candidate specializing in Islamic art and architecture of the South Asian subcontinent with a general research interest in Sufi shrine architecture and a specific interest in the representations of cities in photography and literature. Her dissertation, which is tentatively titled: “Palimpsests of the Past in the Present: Shapes of Delhi in Visual and Literary Cultures (1947-present)" aims to examine the Indian capital city, Delhi, not simply as a space constructed through built structures but also as an idea constructed through the pervasive repetition of specific visual and textual imagery from twentieth-century popular cultures. She is also minoring in South Asian Literature.
Anna is a PhD candidate specializing in Contemporary art and Critical Theory. Her dissertation focuses on three recent works by installation artist Fred Wilson, whose interventions into the museum raise critical questions regarding the construction of history as it relates to race. Her dissertation will address how Wilson's recent projects take aim at three forms of knowledge production that developed in the early modern period: physiognomy, ethnography, and natural history, and their effect on constructions of race in the contemporary moment.
Radha is a doctoral student in Islamic art, focusing specifically on the modern era. She is especially interested in issues concerning the melding of art and technology.
Lauren is a Ph.D candidate with a concentration in Contemporary Art and Critical Theory. Her dissertation focuses on contemporary male American artists who utilize their own bodies as an erotic subject in their work, and examines the cultural prohibitions that make such dispatches a rare phenomenon in American contemporary art. She approaches this subject through a critical lens that incorporates visibility and gender politics as well as social history. Prior to joining the Department of Art History, Lauren earned her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, where she was a contributing writer to the arts and cultural magazine Review.
Midori is a doctoral student currently working on her dissertation, "Sec's Appeal: The Secretary in American Popular Culture, 1900-64." By examining the material world of office workers, including the full range of images, objects, and environments that they interacted with on a daily basis—rather than focusing on a single type or medium—Midori's work seeks to bring unexpected issues about 20th century women to the surface. Foremost among these are concerns about the identity of the "modern" woman, specifically in regards to work, class and sexuality.
Atreyee is a Ph.D. student specializing in South Asian art. Using the Shilpi Chakra, a Delhi-based artist’s collective, as a lens, her Ph.D. dissertation traces the development of institutions for the production, exhibition, and collection of art works in India as symptomatic of the formation of a postcolonial public sphere. As an extension of her interest in the institutionalization of art in colonial/postcolonial India, she has recently published essays on global art history and the interface between religion and archaeology in India. Atreyee completed her B.A. in Art History from M. S. University, Vadodara before joining the University of Minnesota for a M.A. in 2003.
Melissa Heer is a PhD candidate studying Contemporary Art and Theory. She is particularly interested in looking at the way in which visual culture and artistic production intersects with issues of globalization and urban development in the construct of the "World City". With a secondary concentration in South Asia, Melissa has considered this question in relation to art and urban environments in Bangalore India.
Venugopal Maddipati has a B-Arch degree from the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi. He is now a PhD. candidate at the department of Art History at the University of Minnesota. His dissertation focuses on the impact of Gandhian ideas and ideals in the field of Architecture, primarily in India and South Africa. He is particularly interested in the manner in which localism, or thinking locality emerges in the writings of such diverse authors such as Christian Norberg Shulz, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Laurie Baker and Alberto Perez Gomez. The ideal of low cost architectural construction, especially in the rural housing sector in India, and the manner in which, this ideal intersects with diverse ethical philosophies as they emerge in pre and post independance regional literature is of interest to him. For the Fall and Spring semesters 2006 – 2007, he will be in India on a American Institute of Indian Studies fellowship to conduct his dissertation research. He will be traveling and examining the work being done at Delhi, Wardha, and the various Nirmiti Kendras at Kollam, Trivandrum and Trichur in Kerala and by Ashramites at Yerupedu and Warangal in Andhra.
Ceri is a doctoral candidate specializing in contemporary art and theory. She earned her MA at Bowling Green State University, where her thesis examined the work of the French performance artist Orlan and its unique interaction with the male gaze of Western art history. She is currently working on her dissertation, "The Visible Posthuman: Envisioning Agency for the Cybernetic Self in Digital Culture," which examines works by artists including Orlan, Stelarc, Charlotte Davies, and Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau to explore the visual aspects of posthumanism.
Sugata is a Ph.D. student specializing in South Asian art. His Ph.D.
engages with 19th and 20th-century architecture and the visual culture of
Braj Bhumi, a pilgrimage site in north India, as indicative of a modern
re-configuration of religion and identitities mediated through colonialism,
nationalism, and urbanization. Beyond his interest in modern pilgrimage
sites, Sugata has also published essays on Indian popular print culture,
20th-century advertising, and, most recently, the notion of a “global art history.” In addition to an M.A. in Art History from M. S. University, Vadodara, Sugata holds an M.Phil. from the Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata.
Adair Rounthwaite is a PhD student specializing in contemporary art and theory. Her interests include participatory practices, installation, video art, and postcolonial, queer, feminist, and film theories. Her dissertation will contextualize Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics and critiques thereof within concepts of the relation between experience and social transformation popular during the 1990s. Adair holds a BA in Art History from the University of Guelph and an MA in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam. Her article 'Veiled Subjects: Shirin Neshat and Non-liberatory Agency' appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture in August 2008.
Emily is a first year Masters student focusing on 19th and 20th century art. She is particularly intersted in religious subject matter and representations of Judaism. She received her undergraduate at Boston University and has spent the last few years working in art education in various settings including museums and community centers.
Sarah Sik is a Ph.D. student specializing in 19 th-century art. Her research interests include the turn-of-the-century Minneapolis designer John Scott Bradstreet; the exhibition of a suite of fifty-nine German kunstgewerbe rooms sent to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904; the interchange of artist-potters in France, Japan, and America from 1867 to 1900; the emergence of celebrity culture in fin-de-siècle France; the figure of Pierrot in French art (particularly focused upon the prominence of this figure in the work of the French humorist Adolphe-Léon Willette); the roles of satire, sadism, and sanity in the organization of the Rose + Croix exhibition society, the writings of Max Nordau, and the critical response of George Bernard Shaw; and the French symbolist sculptor François-Rupert Carabin, the subject of her dissertation research.
Foad Torshizi holds a Bachelors degree in Graphic Design and a Masters of Fine Arts in Photography from Tehran's University of Art. He joined University of Minnesota's art history graduate program in January 2008 after a semester of studying in the field of Critical Studies at Malmö Art Academy, Lund University in Sweden. He is interested in locating postmodernism in the Middle East and in examining the politics and strategies of representation and display in relation to contemporary art forms created in the social context of marginalized countries. Postcolonialism, exoticism and self-exoticism, orientalism, cultural hybridity, and globalization are focal points of his research interests as well as issues of power and hegemony in relation to the representation of the Middle East. His research currently looks at the vocabulary of art history as a Western discipline implemented by institutions and scholars to interpret Iranian contemporary lens-works, and the possibility for the artists to a global emancipation of this reductive language.
Erica is a Ph.D. student specializing in 19th and early 20th century art. She received her M.A. from New York University where her thesis involved an examination of the idea of the muse as a label for the artists Dora Maar and Gabriele Munter. Her research interests include women artists, criticisms of their works, representations of women in art, connections between literature and the visual arts, Scandinavian art at the end of the 19th century, and art theory.
Laura is a first year Masters student focusing on Contemporary Art. She is particularly interested in the ways in which contemporary art intervenes with contemporary culture, particularly French contemporary society. She received her undergraduate degree from Macalester college with a major in International Studies and French. She is also soon to complete her Masters in Art Administration from Saint Mary’s University for which she has worked in a variety of different administrative positions in several art organizations, including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts here in the Twin Cities.
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September 22, 2009
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