Art History, Ph.D.

Arunima Addy
Degree: PhD in Architecture
Research Focus: South Asian architectural and urban history
Dissertation title: Diaspora of Indian Temple Architecture
Academic Adviser: Madhuri Desai
aua1169@psu.edu

Arunima Addy is currently a PhD candidate in Art History with dual title in Asian Studies. She has been a practicing architect in India, before joining the graduate program at Penn State. Arunima has her research interests in the relationship between the politics of religion and the construction of national identity, specifically with the rising sentiments of Hindu nationalism in India. She looks at visual representations in the built environment to understand how through architectural establishments religion is being used as a political tool to frame an image of the nation. For her dissertation, she is investigating the relationship between the politics of religion and nation-building particularly with respect to changing dynamics of Indian temple architecture in the neoliberal perspective where religion is becoming a global commodity.

Han Chen
Degree: PhD in Art History and Asian Studies
Research Focus: Modern and Contemporary Chinese and East Asian Art, history of collecting and exhibiting
Dissertation title: Negotiating the Global Knowledge of China through Art Trade, 1900-1950
Academic Adviser: Chang Tan
hbc5231@psu.edu | CV

Han Chen is a PhD student specializing in the history of collecting and exhibiting Chinese and East Asian art in the Euro-American context from the late nineteenth-century to the present day. She received her B.A. in 2016 and M.A. in 2019 from China Academy of Art. In 2021, she received her second M.A. from Penn State where she wrote her thesis entitled, “Selling China: A neglected encounter between Huo Mingzhi and France in the early twentieth century.” She has worked for the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State and the Freer and Sackler Gallery of Art as a curatorial intern. Her current interest lies in employing machine learning to realize the image inpainting of photographs of Chinese antiques.

Melanie Clark
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus:
Dissertation title:
Academic Adviser: Madhuri Desai

Olivia Crawford
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus: Nineteenth-century European Art and Architecture, Post-colonial Studies, Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern and North African Studies.
Dissertation title: TBD
Academic Adviser: Nancy Locke
ofc1@psu.edu

Olivia Crawford received her B.A. in Art History and French and Francophone Studies from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2016 and her M.A. in Art History from Penn State University in 2018. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at Penn State.

Her current research examines representations of colonial and metropolitan Jewish communities in French Orientalist art and architecture. Her dissertation prospectus is forthcoming.

Crawford lives and works in Knoxville, TN.

Noah Dasinger
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus: Fifteenth-century Italian sculpture
Dissertation title: TBD
Academic Adviser: Daniel M. Zolli
nfd5261@psu.edu | LinkedIn

Noah Dasinger is a first-year Ph.D. student studying Italian Renaissance art and architectural history with a focus on fifteenth-century sculpture. Noah is an Alabama native, and in 2020, he graduated summa cum laude from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, with a Bachelor of Arts. He then obtained a Master of Arts degree from the University of Georgia, Athens. Upon graduation, he received high honors for his thesis, “Symbolic Epigraphy and the New Rome: Humanist Capital Letters on the Tomb of Leonardo Bruni.”

Noah also has extensive training in archival research and early modern Italian paleography both in the United States and abroad. He was a curatorial intern at the Georgia Museum of Art and a research intern at the Medici Archive Project. His current research examines the development, display, and materials used for fifteenth-century Italian tomb sculpture. Noah’s research also investigates early modern workshop practices, materials, processes, and their relationship to commemorative sculpture.

Arielle Fields
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus:
Dissertation title: TBD
Academic Adviser: Elizabeth Mansfield

Katherine Flanagan
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus:
Dissertation title: TBD
Academic Adviser: William Dewey

Laura Freitas Almeida
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus:
Dissertation title: TBD
Academic Adviser: Sarah Rich

Emily Hagen
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus: Seventeenth-century Italian architecture
Dissertation title: Pietro da Cortona’s Santi Luca e Martina: Rediscovered Relics and the Spectacle of Reform in Seventeenth-Century Rome
Academic Adviser: Robin Thomas
ekh15@psu.edu | CV

Emily Hagen is a Ph.D. candidate in art history studying early-modern Italian architecture with an interest in digital humanities. Her research focuses on churches devoted to martyrs’ relics in seventeenth-century Italy and investigates how architecture amplified the fiction of rediscovery in the context of early-modern Catholic reform.

Katherine Koltiska Banerjee
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus:
Dissertation title: TBD
Academic Adviser: Craig Zabel

Kyle Marini
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus: Ancestral and Early Modern Latin America, Andean Textiles
Dissertation title: The Rainbow Prince: Huáscar Inca's Textile Portrait and the Crafting of Inca Sovereignty
Academic Adviser: Amara Solari
kvm5948@psu.edu | Instagram | LinkedIn | kylemarini.com

Kyle Marini is a Barra Dissertation Fellow in Art and Material Culture and a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at Penn State University. He specializes in the art of the Ancestral and Early Modern Americas. His dissertation concerns the production and ritual use of textiles by the Inca empire. It pivots on an enormous rope sculpture that was annually processed in the foremost Inca solstice ritual and served as the imperial portrait of an Inca emperor. He is developing an interdisciplinary methodology to recover the destroyed rope's construction, appearance, and visual impact across media to illuminate Inca modes of artistic representation. His research has been supported by numerous internal awards across colleges and departments at Penn State, in addition to external fellowships from the Rhode Island Foundation, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Foundation, and Fulbright-Hays.

Keri Mongelluzzo
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus: History of Photography; Modern Art
Dissertation title: Bauhaus/Dream House: The Uncharted Surrealism of New Vision Photography
Academic Adviser: Nancy Locke
klm556@psu.edu | CV | LinkedIn | Academia.edu

Keri Mongelluzzo is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in the history of photography and modern art in Europe. Her dissertation, “Bauhaus/Dream House: The Uncharted Surrealism of New Vision Photography,” examines how French Surrealist sensibilities gained traction with transient artists associated with the Bauhaus, an innovative school of design in interwar Germany. Tracking key Bauhaus figures as they moved throughout Europe and across the Atlantic, “Bauhaus/Dream House” exposes their messy motivations for evoking surrealist themes amidst surges of nationalism and the rise of fascism. To date, Keri’s dissertation research has been supported by the Department of Art History and the Max Kade German-American Research Institute.

Keri’s broader research and curatorial interests in the histories and theories of photography span the medium’s history. She has written steadily on prominent photographers of the twentieth century, like Man Ray and Eugène Atget, presenting papers at the inaugural conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism at the Bucknell Humanities Center and the 24th Annual Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Art at the Barnes Foundation. In addition to curating a number of exhibitions of photography at the Palmer Museum of Art, including Myth Meets Modernism: The Manuel Álvarez Bravo Portfolio (2019) and Framing the City (2018), Keri piloted the museum’s first-ever virtual exhibition, Photography = Abstraction , using Google Slides at the onset of the pandemic and presented her work on this and her collaboration on subsequent virtual exhibitions and tours at the College Art Association Annual Conference in February 2021.

Amy Orner
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus: Eighteenth-Century British Architecture and Urbanism
Dissertation title: TBD
Academic Adviser: Robin Thomas
aeo5185@psu.edu

Amy is a PhD student specializing in eighteenth-century British architecture and urbanism, with a focus on Empire and its effects on architecture. Her research questions consider the social and political influences on architecture, as well as the influence of Empire on Scottish town planning. She received her B.A. in Museum Studies/Art History from Juniata College in 2017, before working as a School Programs Educator for The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. Amy received her M.A. in Art History from Penn State University in 2022 with her thesis titled, “The Palette, the Patron, and the Hand of the Artist: Artemisia Gentileschi in London.”

During her time at Penn State, Amy has worked with the Palmer Museum of Art, the Matson Museum of Anthropology, and as a research fellow in the Center for Virtual/Material Studies.

Annalise Palmer
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus: Modern and Contemporary art, specifically with movement and performance-based work
Academic Adviser: Sarah Rich
lap5966@psu.edu | CV | LinkedIn

Annalise is a first year PhD student whose background in dance heavily influences her research. She hopes to expand upon her previous work and explore the prevalence of choreographic artworks over the past century. Annalise graduated in 2024 with a MA in Art History from Penn State and in 2020 from Centre College with a BA in Art History. During that time, she worked as a Research Assistant within Centre’s Art History Department and as an Intern for Manifest Gallery and the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati, Ohio. After graduation, Annalise returned to the CAC as a Cataloging Intern and collaborated with the Robert O’Neal Multicultural Arts Center to catalog the work of local artist and activist, Robert O’Neal. Following this project, she worked as a Teaching and Gallery Assistant with Centre College. Currently, Annalise works as a Teaching Assistant for Penn State.

Clio Rom
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus:
Dissertation title: TBD
Academic Adviser: James Harper

Alicia Skeath
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus:
Dissertation title: On the Other Side: Representations of the Ojibwe from the Early to Mid-Nineteenth Century
Academic Adviser: Adam Thomas

Kenta Tokushige
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus: Sixteenth-century Italian Military Architecture
Dissertation title: Being a Military Architect: Building Fortifications in Cosimo I de’ Medici’s Realm
Academic Adviser: Robin Thomas
kzt64@psu.edu

Kenta Tokushige is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at The Pennsylvania State University. His dissertation entitled, Being a ‘Military Architect’: Building Fortifications in Cosimo I de’ Medici’s Realm, studies the geopolitical role of fortification building under Cosimo I de’ Medici in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the latter half of the Cinquecento by looking at the design process of a fortification as a collaborative project by people of various social status and the way it was represented in multiple forms of art upon its completion. His research traces the correspondence between the patrons, local governors, and architects regarding the decision-making process and examines the intentions of each individual. Additionally, he is exploring the representation and the circulation of information after the completion of the fortification in relation to the espionage of military information.

His research has been supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Susan W. and Thomas A. Schwartz Endowed Fellowship for Dissertation Research.

He completed his B.Arch. and M.A. in Architecture at Waseda University and Master of Architectural History at University of Virginia.

Holli Turner
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus: Art of Early Modern Southern Europe and Colonial Latin America, the materials and materiality of art, technical art history, theories and practices of conservation, race, and representation in art, decolonial practices in art history
Dissertation title: TBD
Academic Adviser: Daniel Zolli
hmt5287@psu.edu

Holli M. Turner is a doctoral student specializing in early modern art, with a focus on the art of Italy, Spain, and the Americas. Her dissertation will examine the colonial implications of color – broadly understood – in the Venetian artist Titian’s paintings for the Spanish monarchy. This project knits together several core concerns of her work: the materials and materiality of art; the representation of race and ethnicity in art; and the interpretive importance of invisible labor, and laborers, to art’s history. In Summer 2021, Holli is serving as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellow in Penn State’s Art History department, where she is developing a digital humanities project that tracks Titian’s pigments and their origins.

Holli is a Virginia native that was trained in art history and graphic design before embarking on doctoral study. Her research interests also stem from her own artistry. In her spare time, she paints, illustrates, and creates works through traditional and digital media.