Recent Theses
The Thesis project is a central component of our MA program and involves in-depth, original research on a topic of the student’s choosing. All MA students in Art History complete a written thesis; Dual Degree students choose between the Art History thesis or Arts Administration thesis.
For a full list of thesis projects, including abstracts, see SAIC Thesis Repository.
2022 Theses
MA in Art History
- Barrett Burke, “Crossing Borders: Weaving a New Immigration Narrative Through Noelle Mason's Coyotaje Series"
- Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, “Power Play: Self-Formation Through Subculture in Contemporary Chicano Art”
- Elsa Haarstad, “After Preservation Took Over: The Afterlife of Public Housing in Contemporary Art & Design in Chicago”
- Meagan Howard, “Remembering a Pandemic: COVID-19 Monuments, Memory Politics, and Memorialization During Crisis”
- Rylee Thomas, “Leaky Thresholds: The Installation, Performance, and Textual Praxis of C. Ree”
MA Dual Degree in Art History and Arts Administration
- Sophie Buchmueller, “Life and Death under Glass: Exploring the Entanglements of Mark Dion's Neukom Vivarium”
- Heather Burich, “Collections in the Time of Catastrophe: A Study of Disaster Preparedness in Gulf Coast Art and Culture Museums”
- Rebecca Leigh Goodman, “X-Ray Visions: Lynn Hershman Leeson's Representations of Female Medical Patients from the 1960s”
- Marin Layne Florence Williams, “Glorifying Spilled Milk and Decrying Violence: The Dissolution of Public and Private in Sanja Iveković’s Lighthouse”
2021 Theses
MA in Art History
- Samantha Marie Adams, “Ambivalent Images, or Tracing Repetition Compulsion in the Visual Vocabulary of Georges Bataille’s Editing of Documents Magazine, 1929-1930”
- Melanie R. Ball, “An Air of Serenity: Chicago’s Carl Sandburg Village and the Construction of Middle-Class Desire, c. 1962”
- Kelly M. Dolan, “Objects in/of Queer Abstraction: The Transformation of Cassils’ Piss[ed]”
- Chenghan Gao, “Guohua as a Transnational Concept in Global Context (1911-1945)”
- Jake Matthews, “The Legacy of Material in Collective Actions and the Photography of the October Group”
- Denis Mutungi Mwaura, “Mea(morial) Culpa: The Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, Embodiment, and the Afterlife of Slavery”
- Gunnar Olseth, “Touch and Vision in Claude Cahun’s Irrational Objects”
- Antonia Piedmonte-Lang, “Sites of Adjacency: Thinking and Feeling Jacob Holdt’s ‘American Pictures’”
- Qiuyang Shen, “A Body in Places: Performative Monumentality in Eiko Otake’s Spectral Performance”
- Christine Stringer, “Answering to Softness: Materiality, Place, and Conflict in Doris Salcedo’s Sumando ausencias”
- Quinn Veasman, “As Time Goes By: A Speculative Viewing of Ralston Farina’s Aléatoire Je ne Sais Quoi”
- Martha Wilde, "Defamiliarizing Home: Surrealism in the Art of Mona Hatoum"
MA Dual Degree in Art History and Arts Administration
- Nicolay Duque-Robayo, “Curiosity in the City: Affect and the Formation of the Reflective Planner”
- Rebecca Haley, "New Imaginations for the Role of the Museum Trustee"
2020 Theses
MA in Art History
- Gabrielle Christiansen, “Artificial Nature and Total Indulgence: Queer Craft in the Works of Arch Connelly, Nicolas Moufarrege and Greer Lankton”
- Jenny Dally, “Shadow of a Doubt: The Limits of Documentation in Eleanor Antin’s CARVINGs”
- Jennifer Eun, “War, History, and the Legacy of Allegorical Production: Silvia Kolbowski's Art after September 11, 2001"
- Graham Feyl, “Artificial Nature/Total Indulgence: The Materiality of Works by Arch Connelly, Nicolas Moufarrge and Greer Lankton”
- Chava Krivchenia, “Ecosystem, Organism, Molecule: A Triple Scope Study of Lee Bontecou’s Untitled (1964)”
Julia Kulon, “The Subliminal Mimesis of Modernity: Polish Socialist Realist Sculpture, 1950–1954” Lauren Makholm, “Imperative Images: Nirma Zárate's Early Screenprints” Melody Miller, “Other People's Heritage: The Prioritization of Subculture in Three Works by Jeremy Deller” Bradlee Murch, “Of Dusty Pages and Ornament: Hints of Permeability in Charles Locke Eastlake's Ideal Victorian Home” Minh Nguyen, “School of Thought: The Conceptual, Language-Based Practice and Pedagogy of Sàn Art” Lydia Pifer, “Art and the Evolving City: James Turrell's Houston Works” Elizabeth N. Reed, “Grasping for Access: Historical, Contemporary, and Speculative Inquiries on the Presence and Treatment of Design in Museums”
MA Dual Degree in Art History and Arts Administration
- Sophie Jenkins, “Collected, mediated, suspended: the manipulated image worlds of Taryn Simon and Sarah Charlesworth”
- Whitney Mash, “Depictions Of House & Home: The Narratives And Counter-Narratives Held Within Domestic Architecture In The Works Of Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, And Amanda Williams”
- Shannon Hebert Waldman, “Scaffold: Towards an Imperfect Justice”
2019 Theses
MA in Art History
- Madalen Claire Benson, “Site & Territory: Anti-colonialism in Jin-me Yoon and Maureen Gruben’s Contributions to LandMarks2017”
- Stephanie R. Dvareckas, “Dialectics Of The Soviet Avant-Garde In The First Exhibition Of Ukrainian Nonconformist Art”
- Saerom (Celia) Jung, “Kurt Schwitters's Late Works in England (1942-1947): Politics of a Dadaist in Exile”
- Cate MacFadyen, “The Present Process: Deep Lez Processing in the Present in Allyson Mitchell”
- Susan Lee Mackey, “Dreams of the South: Racial Fantasy in the Plantation Photographs of Clarence John Laughlin”
- Yue Ren, “Injection Versus Extraction: Socially Engaged Art of Contemporary China in Context Transformations”
- Miriam R. Ruiz, “Small But Ours: Picture Poems and the Czech Interwar Avant-Garde”
- Isabel Alexander Servantez III, “Creating an Intersectional Chicano Art: The Work of Malaquias Montoya”
- Jacob Zhicheng Zhang, “Performing Identities in the United States: Tseng Kwong Chi, Nikki S. Lee, and Ming Wong’s Migratory Politics”
MA Dual Degree in Art History and Arts Administration
- Lindsey Kathleen Bell, “Accessing Sorrow: The Community Potential of Ragnar Kjartansson’s Durational Performance Works”
- Baiqi Chen, “Active Contemplation: 30 Years of Huang Zhuan and Chinese Contemporary Art”
- Danielle Eady, “Artists in National Parks: New Paradigms to Illuminate Invisible Histories”
- Elliot J. Reichert, “Nationalist Cultural Heritage and the Question of Lebanon: 1939, 1999”
- Carlos Salazar-Lermont, “Curation as a Bridge Between Communities. The Claudio Perna: Human Geography Project”
- Cici Wang, “The Future Development of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art in State-Owned Museums in China”
- Celina Wu, “Visualizing the Invisible: Learning to See Photography”
2018 Theses
MA in Art History
- Lily Brewer, “Reading Omni: Visuality and Science Popularization in the Magazine of the Future”Alden Nowell Burke, “Under This Name, Another: The Presentation of Self and Naming with Hannah Wilke and Senga Nengudi”
- Kathryn Cato, “Taking Up Space: Investigating Genders Through Formalism in Contemporary and Postminimal Contexts”
- Zoe Louise Carlson, “Cecilia Vicuña: Towards a Contemporary Indigenism 1990-2010”
- Daisy Charles, “Place and Process: Conceptual Art in Edmonton, Inuvik, and New York”
- Luna Goldberg, “Performing Critique: Three Case Studies at the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Biennale”
- Veronica Sesana Grajales, “A Global Nationalism: Designing the Wall & the Integration of the Arts in Brasilia”
- Makayla May, “Activating the Archive: Mapping Mediation and its Afterlife in the Work of Sammy Baloji”
- Ratna R. Patel, “Work of Art in the Age of Public-Private Partnership”
- Brandi Cordier Sjostrom, “Constructing Identities Online: Examining Amalia Ulman's Excellences & Perfections Series”
- Elle Tompkins, “The Art of Eating: An Investigation of Contemporary Artists and Designers Who Critically Analyze Industrial Food, Marking Their Parallels to Gastronomic Social Movements”
- Xue Yang, “Park, Protest, and Pop South Korea's Candlelight Protest of 2016-17”
MA Dual Degree in Art History and Arts Administration
- Lindsey Jancay, “Stenographic Image and the Shorthand Imaginary: An Iconographic Analysis of the Gregg Shorthand Anniversary Edition”
- Tally de Orellana, “Curating Difference: Appropriation and Antagonism in Identity Formation”
- Ian Gabriel Wilson, “Essential Ornaments: The Architecture of Ödön Lechner & The Development of a Magyar Style”
- Yinzi Yi, “Criticality and Complicity in Cao Fei's RMB City: The Production and Circulation of Regional Images in a Global Art Context”
2017 Theses
MA in Art History
- Nour Ammari, “Iconoclasm and the Islamic State: Understanding ISIS’ Destruction of Cultural Heritage
- Alice Ashiwa, “The Making of Art Spaces in Post-WWII Tokyo: The Case of the Sogetsu Art Center”
- Kat Buckley, “Threading Through the Interwar: Nomadism, Tapestry, and the Rediscovery of Marie Cuttoli”
- Claire Frost, “The Future Eva Hesse: Lucy Lippard, Sol Lewitt, and the Construction of Eva Hesse”
- Lindsay Garbutt, “All Known Means of Design: Reproduction and Audience Engagement in Herbert Bayer’s Bauhaus Exhibition Design at the Museum of Modern Art, 1938”
- Zeenat Nagree, “‘Surviving Culture,’ ‘Co-Existing Cultures.’ Indigenism and Authenticity in the Art of Criticism of Geeta Kapur and J. Swaminathan in the 1960s”
- Hannah Pivo, “Forming Flow: Knud Lonberg-Holm and Ladislav Sutnar’s Information Design Manuals and the Development of Modern Visual Communication Standards”
- Brit Erin Schulte, “Queering the Weimar Archive: The Transgressive Bodies & Transgressive Performances of Anita Berber & Sebastian Droste”
- Veronica Sines, “System as a Tool, Art as Energy: The Significance of Language in the Works of Lee Lozano”
- Kevin Whiteneir, Jr., “Queer Heretics: Case Studies in the Convergence of Witchcraft and Queerness in Contemporary Art.”
MA Dual Degree in Art History and Arts Administration
- Zoe Alexandra Goldman, “Leading America Through Local Modernism: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes' (Mexico) Exhibitions and Publications on Architecture, 1950-1952”
- Lydia Claire Gordon, “Maternal Ambivalence and Non-Normative Maternal Desires in Chelsea Knight's The Breath We Took, 2013
2016 Theses
MA in Art History
- Farah Zeynep Aksoy, “Mediated Modernism: Jewad Selim's Wall Paintings and the Vacillations of Postcolonial Iraq”
- Paula Calvo, “Materiality and Reproduction: Photographs of the Disappeared Recovered by Victor Basterra”
- Frances Claire Dorennaum, “Keep in Touch: Reading and Relationships in Moyra's Davey's Burn the Diaries, My Saints, and Of Jane”
- Lillian M. Elliott, “Great Scott! Picturing the Past through the Waverley Novels”
- Annalise Flynn, “Something in the Water: The Sea, the Slabs, and Leonard Knight's Salvation Mountain”
- Sabrina Greig, “Order and Chaos in the City: Cartography's Mediation of Race Relations, Labor, Industry, and Transit in Chicago”
- Lauren Marie Johnson, “Breaking Typography's Glass Window: Materiality as Mode in Robert Massin's Typographic Redesigns of French Postwar Experimental Literature”
- Denise Joseph, “Construction Ahead: Saadiyat Island Cultural District, A Case Study in Becoming a Cultural Capital”
- Shang-Huei Liang, “Action, Image, Archive Chen Chieh-Jen's Art of Re-Imagining, Re-Narrating, Re-Writing, and Re-Connecting”
- Greg Sato, "Sophisticated Ignorance": Quantifying the Film Canon”
- Ke Wang, “Translation as Relation: Art History Translated into Chinese”
- Sarah Wheat, “The Architect as Nomad: A Critical Examination of Bruno Taut's Theory of Architecture”
- Ange Wong (Wai Man Wong), “To Cut and to Arrange: Radical Ikebana and Avant Garde Art in the 1950s”
MA Dual Degree in Art History and Arts Administration
- Ligia Herrera, “Urban Development, Street Art and Neighborhood Branding in Wynwood”
- Olivia Junell, “Diversity, Access, and Participation in Contemporary Arts Philanthropy”
- Arthur Kolat, “Twilight on the Roads:The Wagner Drives of David Hockney”
- Barbara Ann Meisinger, “The Strange and Autonomous Gas Station”
- Alda Akhsar Tchochiev, “Cardinal Loop Conference Proposal: A Commitment to Contemporary Cultural Conversation in Chicago”
