Recent MA Thesis and PhD Dissertation Topics

"if you can surrender to the air, you can ride it": the alchemy of vanessa german (MA 2022)
 
Transgressive Masculinity: Picturing Bluebeard in Britain's Golden Age of Illustration (MA 2022)
 
Black Masks, Raced Skin, and the Flawed Archive: Examining Identity in the Simien Collection Dual Portrait (MA 2022)
 
Barbarism, Benevolence, and Alterity: Illuminating Christian-Muslim Relationships in the Medieval Levant and the Modern Museum (MA 2021)
 
La recuperación de Bahía de Todos los Santos and the Spanish Invention of Brazil (MA 2021)
 
Making a Miracle: Doge Ranieri Zeno's Invention of the Apparitio at the Church of San Marco (MA 2021)
 
"Somos madres ¿y qué más?": Feminism, Maternal Subjectivity, and Artistic Practice in Mexico City, 1971-91 (PhD 2021)
 
Under Arrest: Photography, Censorship and the Mapplethorpe Controversy (PhD 2021)
 
A Song of Memory & Identity: Analysis of the Prefatory Cycle of the Melisende Psalter (MA 2021)

The Caribbean at an Arm's Length: American Imperial Spectatorship in the Underwood & Underwood 1901 Stereotour of Puerto Rico (MA 2021)

Anchored in Chalk: The Fall and Rise of Cy Twombly (MA 2021)
 
e(femme)era: Materialized Identity-making in South Texas-based Feminist Zines (MA 2021)

Sensational Reliquaries: Devotion and Experience in the Twelfth Century (MA 2020)

Acquiring Little Mexico: William Spratling's Object Collection Practices and the U.S. Collection of Mexican Objects, 1926 to 1940 (MA 2020)

Precious Materiality in Colonial Andean Art: A Case Study of Marian Paintings (PhD 2019)
 
Their Flickering Creations: Value, Surface, and Animacy in Nahua Treasured Art (PhD 2019)

The Art of Erasure: The Story of a Free Woman of Color from Antebellum New Orleans (MA 2019)

Becoming “Brazilian”: The Brazilian Cultural Performance for Henri II’s (1519-1599) King of France Royal Entry into Rouen, Normandy, 1550 (MA 2019)

Heavenly Perspectives: Imagining Celestial Space in Giovanni di Paolo's Paradiso Miniatures (MA 2019)

Grace Hartigan and Frank O'Hara: Partnership, Painting, and Camp in the New York School (MA 2019)

"Para el ala y para el vuelo": Photography and Nation in Revista Alero (MA 2019)

De/Face: Performance and Painting in Chicanx Public Art (MA 2019)

Shifting Landscape: Depictions of Cultural Disruption and Continuity in the Mapa Uppsala of Mexico-Tenochtitlan (PhD 2018, MA 2012)

Breeching Taboo: Depictions of Pregnancy in the Work of Gustav Klimt (MA 2018)

Orientalized Indigenism in Chile: Expansionism, Genocide, and Art(1845-1905) (MA 2018)

Matrices of Devotion: Lima’s Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Devotional Prints and Local Religion in the Viceroyalty of Peru (PhD 2018)

Figuring Female Corporeality: The Body in the Early Work of Nikki de Saint Phalle (MA 2017)

Catherine of Siena: Images in the Construction of Her Identity as Preeminent Female Dominican Saint (MA 2017)

Cutting Time: A Temporal Reading of Wangechi Mutu’s Collaged Bodies (MA 2017)

Excavating Contemporary Beauty: Citations of Ancient Greek Art in the Works of Fred Wilson, Yves Klein, and Jeff Koons (MA 2017) 

Made in China: Chinese Export Art and Its European  Reception in the Seventeenth Century (MA 2016)

The Emulative Copy: Andrea del Sarto's 1525 Pope Leo X with Two Cardinals (MA 2016)

Alexander the Great: Created in Whose Image? AStudy in the Byzantinization of ΜΕΓΑΣ ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΣ in Venice Hellenic Institute Codex Graecus 5 (MA 2016)

Homophobia, coding and Jasper Johns (MA 2015)

Masculinity, blood, and the painted blush: the significance of ruddy cheeks in portraits of male sitters, from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century (MA 2015)

So it blossoms, so it shines : precious feathers and gold in pre- and post-conquest Nahua aesthetics (MA 2014, PhD 2019)

Death and violence in the headlines : Andy Warhol's reconstructions of mass media (MA 2014)

Mirror mirror : reflections on specularity in Mary Cassatt's Mother and Child (1905) (MA 2014)

Contemporary Argentine art and ecological crises (PhD 2013, MA 2008)

Mason's study of the "photography problem" : a splendid look at the limitations of black masculinity in American photography from Cuba in 1898 (MA 2013)

The fate of fatherhood : the impact of assisted reproductive technologies on male parenthood and power (PhD 2013)

Painting pauses : Manet's early paintings and the tableau vivant (MA 2012)

Intertwinings of touch, mortality, and artistic process in Michelangelo's last Pietàs (MA 2012)

The miraculous presence of the Virgin of Belé́n and Christ of the Earthquakes in colonial Cuzco (MA 2012)

Celebrating modernity or modernismo? Art in Mexico City's 1910 centenary of independence (MA 2012)

Forgotten landscapes : reassessing the work of Edward Mitchell Bannister (MA 2012)

Pedagogy and artistic practice at the Colegio de Santa Cruz : a comparative study of the Florentine codex and Badianus herbal (MA 2012, PhD 2018)

Miraculous crucifixes and colonial Mexican society : the artistic, devotional, and political lives of Mexico City's early-colonial Cristos (PhD 2012, MA 2007)

The absent king : Spanish portraiture and decline in the 1640s (MA 2011)

Looking beyond the silhouhette [sic] : motives, meanings, and muck in the work of Kara Walker (MA 2011)

Victor Ochoa's lotería-based exploration of identity, community, and border issues (MA 2010)

Icons of empire : the art and history of Aztec royal presentation (PhD 2009)

Inventing an iconography : images of Saint Francis of Assisi in the Duecento (MA 2009)

Collecting the culture of Native Americans : George Hubbard Pepper and America's fascination with Southwestern Indians, 1879-1914 (MA 2009)

Public dialogues : the use of text in public space in the work of Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres (MA 2009)

Inter-American perspectives on La pintura contemporánea norteamericana, 1941 (MA 2008, PhD 2013)

The triumph of Dalou : modelling republicanism in late nineteenth-century France (MA 2008)

Otaku, consumerism, and Kawaii : Takashi Murakami critiques Japanese popular culture (MA 2008)

The body imitated : three practices of early modern figural representation (MA 2008)

Exoticism, Neo-Classicism and Sicily in the Voyage pittoresque folios of Abbé St. Non and Jean Hoüel (MA 2007)

Seeing sanctity : the presentation and perception of the image of the Virgin of Remedies in early colonial Mexico (MA 2007, PhD 2012)

From body builders to cartoons : appropriation and gender in paintings of the 1960s (MA 2007)

Eulogizing the cadaver : Rembrandt's anatomy lessons (MA 2007)

The space of installation art : Whitread, Holzer, and Gonzalez-Torres (MA 2007)

Where the dream becomes reality : an exploration of space in visionary environments (MA 2007)

Performing postmodernism : the body art of Sarah Lucas and Matthew Barney as instantiations of the gender theories of Judith Butler and Donna Haraway (MA 2007)

Woven imagery in the pictorial codices : an analysis of the role of textiles in central Mexico at the time of the Aztec empire (MA 2007)

Exoticism, Neo-Classicism and Sicily in the Voyage pittoresque folios of AbbéSt. Non and Jean Hoüel (MA 2007)

Printing a New World : the printing industry of New Spain and the formation of visual culture in Mexico (MA 2006)

The emergence of the prostitute as flâneuse in Manet and Degas (MA 2006)

Nineteenth century fashion and the modern identity of women in the works of Manet, Morisot, Degas and Cassatt (MA 2006)

Naturalism in Newcomb Pottery designs after 1910 : the irony of the "scenics" (MA 2006)

The yahui : form and function (MA 2006)

Aurora Reyes : a woman who personifies the intersection of art and politics in revolutionary Mexico (PhD 2006, MA 2000)