Ph.D. Student Cohort
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: TBD
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
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.
Karly Etz
Arielle Fields
Katherine Flanagan
Laura Freitas Almeida
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.
Delnaaz Kharadi
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus: Zoroastrian art and architecture, South Asian art and architecture
Dissertation title: TBD
Academic Adviser: Madhuri Desai
dfk5452@psu.edu | CV | Portfolio | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | ResearchGate | Academia.edu | Issuu
Delnaaz is a PhD student in South Asian and Pre-Islamic art history. She specializes in the architectural production, ritual use, cultural value and iconography of Zoroastrian art and architecture. She belongs to the Parsi community of India, an ethnic minority of Zoroastrian faith, whose long and complicated history influences both her scholarly interests and personal worldview. She looks into the Zoroastrian diaspora in India and traces their aesthetic roots back to Persia (modern day Iran) from where Zoroastrians migrated in 760 A.D. She builds a comparative analysis of Zoroastrian art and architecture with Classical Greek and Roman traditions and investigates their mutual influences. In this regard she particularly looks into Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of History’ where he identified Achaemenid Persians as the ‘first historical people’ and deliberated on ‘Zoroaster’s light’ as a predecessor of modern European thought, which helps her understand the construct of ‘Classical’ as a fundamental category of art, architecture and aesthetic history.
Katherine Koltiska
Kyle Marini
Degree: PhD in Art History
Research Focus: Pre-Contact and Early Modern Latin America, Andean Textiles
Dissertation title: TBD
Academic Adviser: Amara Solari
kvm5948@psu.edu | Instagram | LinkedIn
Kyle is a PhD student in pre-contact and early modern Latin American art history. He specializes in the techniques of production, ritual use, and iconography of Inca textiles. He primarily researches ceremonial objects that have been destroyed to recover a more representative view of Inca visual culture before Spanish occupation of the Andes. This approach is in effort to decolonize modern understandings of the Inca developed from the study of objects that survived arduous extirpation campaigns throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru. By emphasizing objects erased from the archive, he reconstructs a history through the most integral Inca artifacts that ceased to exist precisely because of their visual power. Kyle is also a practicing artist, and he uses remaking as a methodology to envision these lost works and the technical processes used by their creators.
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.
Alicia Skeath
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
Personal website | 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.
Yixin Xu
