DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Graduate Student News

Sasha Artamonova

In 2024–25, Sasha Artamonova conducted multi-sited dissertation research across Ethiopia, Mali, and Senegal with support from the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs and the Program of African Studies. She then spent three months in Russia, deepening her archival work in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Her work on transnational artistic exchanges also led to an invitation to contribute to a special issue of Belvedere Research Journal, where her forthcoming article (2026) traces the history of photographic training for African photojournalists in the Eastern Bloc. On June 13, 2025, she co-organized a public conference at the Centre Pompidou with French colleagues Margaux Lavernhe and Coline Desportes, offering a critical engagement with the exhibition Paris Noir. As a Dedalus Dissertation Fellow, Artamonova will spend the 2025–26 academic year in Paris completing her dissertation. 

Gabrielle Christiansen

In 2024, Gabrielle Christiansen completed a Kohler Foundation supported summer fellowship at SPACES Archives in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where she studied and documented vernacular artist-built environments and their histories of stewardship. In February 2025, she presented a paper titled “‘It will not sail’: the dismantling of Kea Tawana’s Ark in Newark and other interruptions of wasteland commoning” at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill as part of the “(Un)contained: Space, Place, Deviant Agents” conference. In the coming academic year, Christiansen will be in residence at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., where she will be completing the 12-month Douglass Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art.

Olivia Dill

This year Olivia Dill completed and successfully defended her dissertation, "Insects 'too Beautiful to be Described:' Maria Sibylla Merian and the Matter of Iridescence in the Colonial Dutch Atlantic," while also serving as the Moore Curatorial Fellow in the Drawings and Prints Department at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Dill’s article, “A Pinch of Smalt,” which presents technical analysis of a previously unattributed drawing by Pieter Hoslteyn II (1614–1673), was accepted for publication by Master Drawings and awarded the journal’s Ricciardi Prize for the best submission by a young scholar. Dill presented her article at the Master Drawings Symposium in New York in February. Among other presentations and publications, Olivia also presented at Washington University Saint Louis’s Symposium “Luster & Sheen: Baroque Materialities,” and participated in the Getty Paper Project’s workshop on inscriptions and collectors’ marks at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Ekaterina Kulinicheva

In 2025, Ekaterina Kulinicheva was advanced to candidacy. Thanks to a departmental Warnock Graduate Research Grant, she conducted two trips to Uzbekistan, doing archival and field research for her dissertation on the artistic and economic exchange between early post-revolutionary Russia and Uzbekistan through the textile industry. She returned to Uzbekistan in the summer to continue her work in the archives as a recipient of the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs Pre-dissertation International Summer Research Grant and Dissertation Research Travel Award. Kulinicheva published a chapter on the temporality of anti-capitalist fashion and post-WWII Soviet fashion theory titled “Socialist Time in Fashion: The Late Soviet Interpretation” in the edited volume Time and Material Culture: Rethinking Soviet Temporalities (Routledge, 2025), edited by Julie Deschepper, Antony Kalashnikov, and Frederica Rossi. In the summer, she presented this chapter at the 2025 International Council for Central and East European Studies World Congress in London. In 2025, one of her and Professor Kennedy's students won the Warnock Prize for Art Historical Writing for a video essay on the Chicago Cultural Center.

Stephanie Lee

In 2024–25, Lee was the Block Graduate Fellow and co-organized Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding: Helen Frankenthaler and Artists' Experiments on Paper (opening September 17th, 2025) at the Block Museum of Art. She also served on the East Asian faculty search committee and made progress on another dissertation chapter. Excerpts from the latter were presented at the University of Chicago, with the title: “Making Yellow: Color Charts, Shiseido, and Asiatic Femininity in East Asian Works-on-Paper." In June, she travelled to Seoul as a member of the Clark Art Institute's "Afro-Eurasian Origins of Print: A Material, Social and Theoretical History" working group, where she gave a collection presentation of objects she studied on a previous Shanley Travel Grant and served as an impromptu interpreter. In the fall, she’ll join the Morgan Library & Museum's Department of Modern and Contemporary Drawings as a Belle da Costa Greene Curatorial Fellow.

Arianna Ray

This year, Arianna Ray was a Fulbright Fellow based in Amsterdam continuing research on her dissertation on seventeenth-century Dutch prints and race. She worked extensively at the Rijksmuseum, Universiteit van Amsterdam Bibliotheek, and Nationaal Archief. Prior to arriving in Amsterdam, Ray spent a month in Brazil for dissertation research, where she visited the sites of the former Dutch colony. Ray presented at several conferences throughout the year, including one with the Newberry Library, the Netherlands Interuniversity Institute for Art History in Florence, and the Rubenshuis in Antwerp. After a year of work with the Digital Humanities Librarian, Ray also launched a digital exhibition on the Herskovits' Library of African Studies' Lydia Luhman Pederson collection, entitled An American's Africa: The Cape to Cairo Route, White Tourism, and Souvenirs From 1950s Africa. She spent the summer writing and is looking forward to a research trip to Suriname in the winter.

Jake Waits

Waits spent this academic year completing his qualifying exams and dissertation prospectus. On a more fun note, he also helped co-organize two talks with fellow graduate representative Amanda Alvarez that featured presentations of new scholarship from art historians in the region, including Megan Sullivan (University of Chicago) and Hermann von Hesse (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign). He spent the summer traveling to continue archival research related to his dissertation on conceptual art and collectivity, before returning to Evanston for the 2025-26 academic year.

Ben Weil

Ben Weil spent the fall conducting research in Italy, where he visited archives and museums in Bologna, Siena, Florence, and San Gimignano. He presented his findings at the University of Padua, the Renaissance Society of America’s annual meeting, the Tenth Quadrennial Italian Renaissance Sculpture Conference, and the International Congress on Medieval Studies. Back at Northwestern, he served as a Graduate Writing Fellow at The Writing Place and worked towards completing his dissertation on the representation of cities in fourteenth-century Italy.