People

VSGSA STUDENT BIOS 2008-09

VSGSA members listed with contact info welcome inquiries regarding the program from prospective graduate students.

DISCLAIMER: The information below is incomplete in its account of accepted and officially enrolled students, and may not accurately reflect the current status of active members. This list reproduces only the information voluntarily submitted by respondents to past or present VSGSA webmasters by the members below.

I. COMPLETING COURSEWORK OR READING FOR EXAMS

Cole Akers
Interests: Museums, urbanism, cinema, contemporary art, disciplinary formations
cakers@uci.edu

Charles Bailey
B.A., Film Studies summa cum laude, University of Oklahoma
Interests: Non-fiction film, New Hollywood Cinema, World Cinema, Chinese and Hong
Kong film, De films van Johan van der Keuken, documentary film production,
Globalization, Chinese cinema reception in Los Angeles (1896-1941)
cwbailey@uci.edu

Kim Beil
B.A., Comparative Literature, Brown University
Interests: Site-specific new media projects, museums, personality in virtual worlds, the role of the critic
kbeil@uci.edu

Stacey Snider Birk
M.A., Film Studies, University of Nottingham
B.A., English/Media Arts Studies, Brigham Young University
Interests: Digital media, online communities
sjsnider@uci.edu

Maria Selene Bose
B.A., English Literature, Stanford University
Interests: Aesthetic, performative, theoretical, and material
relationships between visual media, subjectivity formation
mbose@uci.edu

Patrick Boyle

Daynah Burnett
M.F.A., Non-Fiction Writing, George Mason University
B.A., English with Honors, George Mason University
Art and Non-fiction Editor, So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, 2005-2007
TV/Film writer, PopMatters
Interests: Horror Cinema, Post-9/11 Theory, Trauma Studies, Postmodernism, Genre Studies, Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Imagery, Korean New Wave, The Uncanny
dburnett@uci.edu

Meghan Chandler
B.A., summa cum laude, in Cinema & Cultural Studies (honors) and Psychology, SUNY Stony Brook
Blog staff-writer, FilmClick
Interests: the body in film, fragmentation, human simulacra – dolls, mannequins – in visual cultural, postmodern horror films, Hans Bellmer and Surrealist photography, psychoanalytic, feminist and queer theories
meghan.chandler@uci.edu

David Goetz

Krystal R. Hauseur
M.A., Art History, SFSU. M.A. Thesis: The Displacing Gaze: An analysis of Roger Shimomura's "Campfire Diary"
B.A., History/Art History, UCLA
VSGSA Representative 2006-2007
VS Conference Committee 2007
Octopus, Co-Managing Editor, Vol. 3, "Import/Export"
Interests: American and Asian art. Emphasis in Asian American Studies. Current interests: nationalism, globalism, identity, race, gender, politics of seeing, cultural studies
khauseur@uci.edu

Laura Holzman
B.A., Art History, Swarthmore College, 2006
VSGSA Representative 2008-2009
Interests: Memory, community, museums, the relationship between words and images in popular culture
lholzman@uci.edu

Cecilia Joulain
B.A. English and Cinema Studies, Rutgers University, 2005
Film and Media Studies Faculty Search Representative, 2006-2007
Interests: Cultural Studies, U.S. countercultural film of the ‘60s and ‘70s, representations of Black and Latino social movements, theories of realism in media studies, youth and the coming-of-age, urbanism, underclass identity and geographic affiliation in hip-hop, people’s histories
cjoulain@uci.edu

Eric Morrill
M.A., Métiers et Arts de l'Exposition, mention trés bien, Université Rennes 2 - Haute Bretagne, France
B.A., Music, magna cum laude, Amherst College
Coursework in Aesthetics, Universitetet i Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Coursework in Photography, Image Ouverte, Nîmes, France
Masters Thesis Title: "Aux Limites de la rétrospective: Amor vacui, horror vacui"
Interests: Art since 1945, critical theory, continental philosophy, generative art
Publications: Victor Burgin: Objets Temporels, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007 (coeditor and contributor)
www.ericmorrill.com

Susan King Obarski
M.A., Art History, University of California, Riverside
M.F.A., University of Southern California
B.F.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Masters thesis: "The Reception of German Art and Theory in England from 1908-1938"
Interests: Intertextuality of visual images and literary works, social constructions of gender and their impact on art and theory, imbrication of politics and European modernism (especially in England in the early twentieth century)
sobarski@uci.edu

Yoshi Salaverry
A.B., English Literature, University of Chicago, 2004
Conference Committee 2007
Interests: Critical theory, philosophy, theory and history of media networks

Peter Schweigert
M.F.A., Film Studies, Boston University, 2004
B.A., English/Music, Calvin College, 2000
Interests: Formal analysis, Spiritual in film and issues of representation thereby raised, Film amongst the other arts, Modernism, Paradoxical intersection of high and low, Ontology of the film image
pschweig@uci.edu

Lara Schweller
B.A., Comparative Literature, Harvard University, 2007
VSGSA Representative 2008-2009
Interests: Relationships between new media and the body, public space, and motion,
Comparative arts, 20th Century culture and cultural revolutions
lschwell@uci.edu

Amy Scott
M.A., Art History, University of Missouri
B.A., Art History, University of Kansas
Interests: American Art, with emphasis on the 20th century West. Landscape, occupation, and development in the West, regionalism and labor, contemporary Native and Chicano art
scotta@uci.edu

Tim Seiber
Conference Committee 2007
Interests: Film and Media Studies Graduate Representative 2006-2007

Christina Spiker
B.A., Honors, East Asian Studies, Ursinus College, 2007
Interests: Japanese Contemporary Art, Critical Theory, cultural studies, globalization, Orientalism, abject and grotesque art and their related subcultures, transgression in art
cspiker@uci.edu

Peng-yi Tai

Cindy Urrutia

Erik Watschke

Ken Yoshida

II. PH.D. CANDIDATES/ABD

Daniele Albright
M.F.A., Writing/Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts
B.F.A., Sculpture, New School for Social Research, Parsons School of Design
Interests: Theories of text/image relationships from Enlightenment up through contemporary though, the shifting conceptual frameworks of post-1960 art, contemporary technology’s impact on cognition in visual and literary representation

Chris Balaschak
M.A., Criticism and Theory program, Art Center, 2005
B.A., Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU, 1998
VSGSA Representative 2007-2008
Conference Committee 2008
Tentative dissertation title: "Unstable Ground: photography books and the post-war landscape, 1958-1974"
Interests: Photography and photobooks after 1945, Issues of authorship, indexicality and reproducibility in documentary photography, Institutional history, National, corporate and civic identities, Landscape studies
c.balaschak@uci.edu

Ted Barron
M.S., Film Studies, Boston University
Interests: Nonfiction film theory, avant-garde film praxis and theory, race and realism

Nathan Blake
M.A., Media Studies, New School University, NY. Thesis: The Body is the Screen: Embodiment at the Video Interface
B.A., Art, Hartwick College, NY
Interests: Indiscernabilities, duration, embodiment, synesthesia, cyborg consciousness, rhizomes
blaken@uci.edu

Mark K. Cunningham
M.A. Thesis (2006): "Between Critique and Pleasure: Classifications by and of Three Contemporary Germany Media Taxonomists — Gerhard Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, and Joachim Schmid"
B.A., Art History, Loyola University of Chicago, 2003
Art History Graduate Representative 2007-2008
Interests: Natural history museum dioramas, models and miniatures, realism, theatricality, staged and set-up photography, found and vernacular photography
mkcunnin@uci.edu

Vuslat Demirkoparan
M.A., Visual Studies, UC Irvine, 2006
B.A., English and Studio Art, UC Riverside, 2004
Film and Media Studies Graduate Representative 2005-2006
Conference Committee 2006
Interests: Postcolonial critique, political theory, Orientalism, cultural studies, race critical theories, contemporary Turkish visual culture
vdemirko@uci.edu

Shahriar Fouladi
M.A., Visual Studies, UC Irvine, 2005
Interests: Superman, superheroes, modern American heroism, comic book culture, the Body (changing ideals, transformation, destruction, and destructiveness, U.S. Popular Culture), Mass Culture Theory, Television and Cultural Studies, Fascist/Nazi aesthetics and propaganda, Nationalism/the Nation (as imagined through media), Theories of realism
fouladis@uci.edu

Eva Friedberg
M.A., Visual Studies, UC Irvine, 2004
B.A., Visual Studies and Mass Culture, UC Berkeley, 2001
Octopus Co-Managing Editor, Vol. II-III
Tentative dissertation title: "Lawrence Halprin's Urban Plazas (1960-1976): The Creative Process, Community, and the Spatial Politics of Landscape Architecture"
Interests: The politics of public space, architecture/urban planning and other apparatuses of bodily control, identity and the city, public art, art activism, radical democracy, critical theory
efriedbe@uci.edu

Ginger Hill
B.A., Thesis: Re-(Dis)Covering History and Subjectivity: The Artwork of Carrie Mae Weems, New College of Florida, 1999
VSGSA Representative 2005-2006
Conference Committee 2006
Family Heritage House Museum (http://mcc1.mccfl.edu/heritage/), 2000-2003
Interests: Atlantic Visual Culture of the 18th -19th centuries, African-American Studies, history of portraiture and subject formation, Reconstruction and the history of US public education, pedagogy, race and representation, nationalism, production of sameness, 19th century photography, colorful quilts
evhill@uci.edu

Douglas Hodapp
M.A., Media Arts, University of Arizona
Interests: Film & TV studies, Hollywood history, stardom, and style, popular culture.
dhodapp@uci.edu

Shelleen Greene

Garnet Hertz
Interests: Sociotechnical change, new media, artists and innovation, media in transition, media technologies, media archaeology, history of information technology, dead media, media art practice & history, animals/machines, automata, robotics & biorobotics
http://www.conceptlab.com/ (Homepage)
http://www.conceptlab.com/uci/phd/ (PhD progress)

Stefka Hristova
Interests: Documentary Photography, Cultural Studies
hristovs@uci.edu

Jordy Jones
M.A., Museum Studies, San Francisco State University. M.A. Thesis: "Grey Areas in the Black Market: The Trade in Afghan Antiquities."
B.A., Conceptual and Information Arts, San Francisco State University
Dissertation title: "The Ambiguous I: Photography, Gender, Self." (Self Representation of Gender and Somatic Ambiguity in Photography)
Interests: History and Theory of Photography and Photo-based Practices, 20th Century Avant-Gardes especially Dada, Neo-Dada and Conceptual Art, Contemporary Art, Critical Theory, Queer Studies, Community Formation, Activist Practices, Subject Formation, Critical Autobiography, Psychoanalysis, Bad Subjects and Mutable Bodies, Contested Borders and Permeable Membranes, Curatorial Studies, Film and Media Studies, New Media, The Archive, History of Art Trade, Collecting and Loot
jordyj@uci.edu

Yuka Kanno
Dissertation topic: Theorizing queer/lesbian visual subjectivity in Japanese visual culture
Interests: Feminist film theory, queer studies, queer film criticism, theories of representation, visuality, and embodiment.

Kelly Kirshtner
Octopus Co-Managing Editor
M.F.A., School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2002, Vol. I-II; Editorial Board, Vol. III
Dissertation topic: Anomalies and errata in film sound, unsettled aural/visual perspectives, tragic microphones, radio vision, sonic weapons, and fog.
Interests: Critical theory, science/technology, the Archive, audio-visual geographies, fusion, illusion, failure, Video theory, The uncanny, Horror, sci-fi, surrealism, and the Fantastic, War and Cinema, Hysteria, Sound in literature, Underwater visual and sonic events, Voice(s), Ventriloquism and dubbing, Psychoanalysis
kkirshtn@uci.edu

A. Lee Laskin
M.A., Visual Studies, UCI
M.A., Environmental Studies/Social Political Thought, York University.
B.A., Honors, Philosophy, University of Victoria
B.A., Psychology, University of Victoria
Lecturer in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at UCSC
Lecturer in the Political Science department at San Francisco State
Dissertation title: "Nocturnal Omissions: The Histories of Night Vision"
Interests: Contemporary French Thought, Experimental Film and Video, Critical Science Studies, Media theory, History of Photography, Experimental Ethnography
Publications: The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction, Continuum Press (editor).
alaskin@uci.edu

Vanessa Meikle Schulman
M.A., Visual Studies, UC Irvine. Thesis: "Envisioning American Progress: Thomas Moran and the World of Industry in Late-Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture"
A.B., Art History and American Civilization, Brown University
Octopus Co-Managing Editor, Vol. IV
Art History Faculty Search Representative 2006-2008
Conference Committee 2006
Octopus Submissions Editor, Vol. II-III
Dissertation topic: Representations of industrial sites, machinery, and the laboring body in nineteenth-century American art and visual culture
vmeikle@uci.edu

Heather Murray
VSGSA Representative 2005-2006
Dissertation topic: Topic will explore the bodies produced by biometric technology. Other interests include
Interests: Theories of globalization and societies of control, surveillance technology, body and performance art, gender/sexuality studies.
murrayh@uci.edu

Cynthia Napoli-Abella
MA: Art History, San  Francisco State University
BA: Art History and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine
Dissertation title: "Tony Capellan, Ana Mendieta, and Eliseo Silva: Psychic colonization, subaltern art and cultural communities"
Interests: Installation art from Latin America and its intersection with Psychoanalytic theory and subaltern theory
cnapolia@uci.edu

Jessica Ostrower
MA: UCI, Visual Studies
BA: Barnard College, Columbia University, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures
VSGSA Representative 2007-2008
Interests: Postwar art in Europe and the United States, technology, destruction, and national identity in the art of Great Britain, Germany, and Japan, paroxysm of the project of the (neo-)avant-garde in the 1960s, politics of the avant-garde as historical category
j.ostrower@uci.edu

Natalie Phillips
M.A., Visual Studies, UC Irvine
B.A., Art History and Religious Studies, University of the Pacific
Dissertation Title: "The Pop Apocalypse: Keith Haring's and Kenny Scharf's Remaking of Religion in Contemporary Art"
Masters thesis title: "The Radiant (Christ) Child: Keith Haring's Transformation of the Iconography and Ideals of the Jesus Movement"
Interests: Healing rituals in contemporary art practice, Feminist theory
nephilli@uci.edu

Denise Rogers
Dissertation title: "Becoming Black Woman: Eldzier Cortor's Visualization of the Black Female Body"
Interests: Critical race theory, feminist theory, representations of race in American art from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries, postcolonial theory, U.S. Gender/sexuality, power relations, the gaze

Jennifer Rogers
Interests: Critical and feminist theories, late twentieth-century European film, post-1968 histories, experimental film

Sean Rowe
M.F.A., Art Institute of Chicago
B.A., Studio Art and Art History, UC Davis
Interests: Contemporary art and material culture, visual culture of the American 'frontier,' high modernist sculpture and phenomenology, gender studies, post-colonial theory
srowe@uci.edu

Sami Siegelbaum
B.A., Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU
Conference Committee 2007
Interests: Postwar French Art, May 1968, urban space, institution critique, critical theory
ssiegelb@uci.edu

Arden Stern
B.A., Art-Semiotics, Brown University
Conference Committee 2007
Webmaster 2006-2007
Interests: Branding, 'good' design, typography, critical theory

Thomas Stubblefield
M.A. Art History, University of Illinois--Chicago
B.A. English, University of South Carolina
B.A. Media Arts, University of South Carolina
2007-2008 VSGSA Representative
2007-2008 Conference Committee
Interests: Cultural Memory (Erasure, Absence, Forgetting), Sept. 11, Deleuze, Benjamin, Freud

Mary Trent
M.A., Visual Studies, UC Irvine. Thesis: "Absent-Presences in the Art of Henry Darger"
B.A., Art History, University of Chicago. Thesis: "Trouble with Gender? Reinterpreting the Criticism on Jackson Pollock"
Dissertation title: "Innocence Reproduced: Children and Mass Media in the Art of Joseph Cornell and Henry Darger"
Interests: 20th century American art, outsider art, visual studies
mtrent@uci.edu

Mariana Razo Wardwell
M.F.A., Studio Art, UC Irvine
B.A., Fashion Design, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London
Interests: Mexican Studies, Representations of Indigenous Mexico in Modernity, Messianic Narratives in the Americas, Baroque Regimes of Representation, Soteriology and Secret Histories, The Dialectical Avant-Garde and Ethnography, Postcolonial Critique, Psychoanalysis
mrazowar@uci.edu

Nicole Woods
M.A. Visual Studies, UC Irvine (2005)
B.A. Art History, UCLA (1999)
Awards: Humanities Research Grant (2005;2006), Dissertation Research Grant (2007), Teaching Assistant Awards (2003;2007)
Dissertation title: "'Gift Event': Alison Knowles, Fluxus, and the Enigmatic Work of Art"
Interests: My work attempts to navigate the intersection of modern/contemporary art history, women's studies, performance studies, critical theory
woodsn@uci.edu

Bahar Zaker
M.A., Visual Studies, UC Irvine, 2004
B.A., Philosophy, Art History and Criticism, SUNY Stony Brook, 2000
Octopus Special Content Editor, Vol. II - III
Dissertation title: "Surrealism's Aesthetic Turn: Visual Culture and Memory in Interwar France"
bzaker@uci.edu

III. RECENT GRADUATES

Francesca Bavuso, Ph.D. (2004)
MA in Women's Studies
BA in Classics
Dissertation title: "The Gravity of Memory: Recollection and Forgetting at the Bibliotheque Imperiale of Napoleon III"
Interests: Nineteenth and twentieth-century European art, critical theory, gender and feminist studies, the nature of visuality
fmbavuso@hotmail.com

Joanna Bouldin, Ph.D. (2004)
BA in Art History, Emory University
Dissertation title: "The Animated and the Actual: Toward a Theory of Animation, Live-Action, and Everyday Life"
Interests: Feminist media theory, constructions of race, gender and the body in 20th-century popular culture, animation theory and history
https://mercury.scat.temple.edu/

René Thoreau Bruckner, Ph.D. (2007)
Dissertation title: "The Art of Disappearance: Duration, Instantaneity, and the Conception of Cinema"
Interests: Histories and theories of cinema and pre-cinematic visual culture, early film, avant-garde and experimental film, psychoanalysis, theories of technology, philosophies of time, time travel, Hong Kong action film, cryptozoology.
rbruckne@usc.edu

Tobey Crockett, Ph.D. (2006)
M.A., Critical Theory, Art Center College of Design, 2000
B.A., Art History, Barnard College, 1988
Dissertation title: "The Camera as Camera: New Subjectivities in 3D Virtual Worlds"
Interests: Critical theory of new media, interactivity and virtual worlds, special effects, the art history of technology, the metaphysics of cyberspace
www.tobeycrockett.com
tcrockett@earthlink.net

Analisa Leppanen-Guerra, Ph.D. (2004)
MA, University of Chicago Divinity School
MA in Art History, University of Illinois at Chicago
Dissertation title: "The Child Lost in the Garden of Time: Childhood & the Fourth Dimension in the Works of Joseph Cornell"
Interests: Avant-garde and neo-avant-garde with emphasis on Dada and Surrealism, Baroque and Modern Spanish art and performance, the space/time of childhood, the carnivalesque, and the irrational

Patricia Levin, Ph.D. (2001)
Dissertation title: "About Turns: Minimalism to Excess in the Films of Yvonne Rainer"

Amy Marver, Ph.D. (2002)
Dissertation title: "Home-made Modern: The Museum of Modern Art and the Domestication of European Modernism in America, 1929-1939"

Sheila C. Murphy, Ph.D. (2002)
Dissertation title: "Lurking and Looking: Media Technologies and Cultural Convergences of Spectatorship, Voyeurism, and Surveillance"
Interests: History of visual technologies and spectatorship, theories of visual culture and contemporary media, television studies
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/sac/faculty_staff/murphy.htm

Janice Neri, Ph.D. (2003)
BA in History (U.S./Latin America), Pomona College
Dissertation title: "Fantastic Observations: Images of Insects in Early Modern Europe"
Interests: Visual culture of Northern and Central Europe, 1400-1700, art and science, collecting practices, optical instruments in early modern Europe
janiceneri@boisestate.edu

Beth Rayfield, Ph.D. (2004)
Graduate Feminist Emphasis
Dissertation title: "'Her Apparent Admiration and the Intensity of her Gaze:' Gender, Visuality and the Stereoscopic Viewing Experience"
Interests: Nineteenth-century North American photography and popular culture, feminist theory, visual technologies in the classroom
bethrayfield@hotmail.com