Current MA/PhD Students
Michael Baird
Educational History: Centre College, BA in Art History, 2019
Michael Baird is a doctoral student in the department of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is interested in the Western reception of African material culture and how the discourse of fine art was utilized in the fashioning of national identity at the end of the colonial era. His current work centers on how art education formed an integral component of the British colonial apparatus in the East Africa Protectorate and how this colonial instruction in making continues to influence understandings of art within the contemporary nation-state of Uganda and perceptions of Ugandan art abroad. In 2019, Michael’s senior thesis contended with representations of black masculinity in the oeuvre of Robert Mapplethorpe and the social construction of categories within visual culture. Following his graduation, he worked as a curatorial intern and later curatorial and education assistant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. The work he did at the museum was part of a larger initiative to re-evaluate the ways in which the museum characterizes, displays, and educates the public on African-inspired religions and objects that have acquired religious value.
Sydney Bauer
Educational History: Columbia University, MA Art History 2020; George Washington University, BA Art History, 2017
Sydney is a doctoral student in the department of Art and Art History and a recipient of the Kenan Fellowship through the Royster Society of Fellows at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is specializing in eighteenth and nineteenth century North American art with interests in materiality and craft, decorative objects of the domestic space, depictions of Indigenous figures by Euro-American craftspeople, and Folk and Maritime art.
Sydney earned a B.A. in Art History with a minor in Anthropology from George Washington University and an M.A. in American Art of the 19th Century from Columbia University. Sydney has held positions in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and numerous contract positions in the arts. Most recently, Sydney served as the Gallery and Exhibitions Coordinator of the Foreman Gallery, as well as adjunct lecturer, at Hartwick College. Her Master’s thesis considered the popularity of Indigenous figures serving as figureheads of nineteenth-century ships and their connection to theater and performance.
Rachel Ciampoli
Educational History: College of William and Mary, B.A. in Art History with a minor in Management and Organizational Leadership, 2019
Rachel is a doctoral student in the department of Art and Art History at the UNC specializing in nineteenth-century art of the United States. Her current research, supervised by Dr. Maggie Cao, proposes a reexamination of Eastman Johnson, a prolific nineteenth-century portraitist and genre painter, through discourses of identity and memory. Her undergraduate honors thesis examined nineteenth-century urban ecology, public parks development, and antebellum racial politics through the previously unexplored painting “Servants at a Pump” (1840) by Italian-American artist Nicolino Calyo. Before beginning her Ph.D. program, Rachel spent three years developing a visual arts integration initiative within the Education department at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. At UNC, Rachel has served as a Teaching Assistant in Art History, a Graduate Research Consultant in Comparative Literature, a Teaching Fellow at the Ackland Art Museum, Chair for the Eighth Annual Graduate Symposium: “Matters of Art: Materiality, Functionality & the Agency of Art Objects”, and Co-President of the Art Students Graduate Organization. She lives in Chapel Hill, NC with her boyfriend and her Giant Schnauzer, Ruby
Emily DuVall
Educational History: University of Georgia, M.A. in Art History with Distinction, 2019; Birmingham-Southern College, B.A. in History and Art History, 2016
Emily DuVall is a Ph.D. candidate working with Dr. Tania String. Emily studies the French Renaissance court, specifically expressions of authority found in royal imagery. Her dissertation investigates the French conceptualization of royal space during the reign of François Ier (1515-1547). Emily is a 2022-2023 Wilson Library Hanes Graduate Fellow consulting UNC’s Rare Book Collection of sixteenth-century maps, travel accounts, and royal pamphlets. Emily has received grants from the UNC Graduate School (2021) and UNC’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program (2021). She previously worked as a curatorial intern at the Albany Museum of Art in Albany, Georgia, as a gallery assistant at Portraits, Inc. in Birmingham, Alabama, and as the Pierre Daura Graduate Intern at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georgia.
Sarah Emily Farkas
Educational History: The University of Texas at Austin, MA – Art History, 2019; Oberlin College, BA – Art History and German Studies, 2012
Sarah Farkas is a Ph.D. candidate focusing on sixteenth-century English and German art, advised by Dr. Tatiana C. String. She is especially interested in issues of gender, the Reformation, decorative objects, and jewelry in the early modern world. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “Women’s Consumption: The Portraits and Possessions of Anne of Cleves and Sibylle of Cleves.” She was a 2020-21 Wilson Library Hanes Graduate Fellow working with numerous English books and documents in the Rare Book Collection, the 2020-21 Graduate Intern at the Ackland Art Museum, and the recipient of UNC’s Doctoral Merit Assistantship (2019-2020). She has previously presented papers at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference and the University of Cambridge conference Dressing a Picture: Reimagining the Court Portrait 1500 – 1800. At UNC, she has served as the co-president of the Art Student Graduate Organization and a co-chair of the Art & Art History Department’s 6th annual symposium, Labor Relations. At both UT Austin and UNC, Sarah has worked as a Teaching Assistant and Graduate Research Assistant. While an undergraduate at Oberlin College, Sarah also worked as a Curatorial Assistant for the Allen Memorial Art Museum.
Josh Hockensmith
Website: http://www.bluebluerbooks.com/
Educational History: University of Richmond, BA, 1995
My main area of interest is artists’ publications: artists’ books, zines, Web-to-print work, and other kinds of printed matter. I came to artists’ publications as a writer and poet interested in how different embodiments of a text affect its meaning, so I’m very interested in the intersection of text and visual art, and in a postcolonial view of the book as just one among many technologies of content transmission across cultures. I’m a career library worker involved in collecting artists’ publications and teaching with them. I also have a studio practice creating them under the press name Blue Bluer Books. My poems, translations, and flash fiction have appeared in some literary journals over the years and my artists’ books are held in a number of library, museum, and private collections.
Taylor Hunkins
Twitter: @HunkinsTaylor
Educational History: Dickinson College, BA in Art History, 2017
I am a PhD student studying Contemporary African Art, with a specific interest in the intersection of art, visual culture, and design within East Africa. Currently, I am thinking about visual culture in and around Nairobi, Kenya and how artists/art collectives employ the aesthetics of visual and material culture to construct their own understandings of local, national, and international identity. As a subsection of this inquiry, I am fascinated with populist or ‘pop’ art in Kenya, its aesthetic make-up, and political ramifications. Prior to coming to UNC, I received my BA in Art History from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. During my time at Dickinson, I curated “Mafile Fen,” an exhibition of Bamana sculpture and textile that explored the relationship between performance and object in Bamana aesthetics. I have also held internships at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Museum of African Art in DC.
Abigail Ilfeld
Educational History: Trinity College Dublin, European Studies B.A.; Columbia University, Political Science B.A
Abigail Ilfeld is a first year master’s student in UNC’s art history program. She graduated with two BAs in European Studies and Political Science from Trinity College Dublin and Columbia University, and received First Class Honors on her Capstone Project, “Alternative-Modernities: Confronting and Challenging the Eurocentric Implications in André Breton’s Encounter with Hector Hyppolite, Haiti 1945.” Before coming to UNC, she interned at the Franklin Furnace Archive in Brooklyn, NY, an organization dedicated to the support and public promotion of avant-garde art.Her research interests include American and Latin American contemporary art, political performance art, methods of institutional critique, and the tensions between aesthetics and communicability in work that claims political or public intent. She is currently working at the Ackland Art Museum as a public programming intern.
Meg MacKenzie
Educational History: American University, B.A. in Art History with a minor in Psychology, 2019; American University, M.A. in Art History, 2021
Meg (they/she) is a first-year PhD student. Their research interests deal primarily with the intersections of art and radical politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They are interested in the ways in which an artist’s work can serve–or undermine–their political goals. Their master’s thesis, entitled “The Darkroom as Weapon? Anti-Colonialism and Ethnography in Raoul Ubac’s Penthésilée Photomontages,” considered the complexities of the surrealist movement’s ideas about radical liberation and violence as a means to that end. Meg has presented their master’s thesis at the Middle Atlantic Symposium in the History of Art, co-hosted by the National Gallery of Art and the University of Maryland.
Christina Marks
Aisha Marie Muhammad
Twitter: AishaMMPhD
Educational History: SUNY New Paltz, Bachelor of Arts in Art History and History (Cum Laude), 2012; School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Master of Arts in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory and Criticism, 2015
My work focuses on depictions of ruin and decay in contemporary Congolese art, particularly surrounding physical infrastructure and national identity. Using Kishasa and Lubumbashi as my anchors, I explore how local artists interrogate local dilapidation as sites of resistance and reclamation. Poetics of ruin, memory studies and postcolonial theory are central to my work. My previous research focused on Nigerian performance artist Jelili Atiku, and his works as public interventions. Concurrent research addresses broader contemporary Congolese art, central African mining/Copperbelt and ruination studies. Scholarships and Fellowships: Mellon Foundation Humanities for the Public Good Fellowship, Foreign Language & Area Studies Fellowship (Kiswhahili), Object-Based Teaching Fellowship at the Ackland Art Museum, Off-Campus Research Fellowship
Dylan J Seal
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dylan-seal-3180571b7
Educational History: University of Mississippi, BA in Art History (Minor in Religious Studies), 2023
Dylan is a second-year MA student in art history. His thesis will focus on the oeuvre of the British-South African photographer Constance Stuart-Larrabee. Dylan is currently the Rand Lecture Assistant for the department of Art and Art History and has previously held teaching assistantships at both UNC and the University of Mississippi. He also interned at the University of Mississippi Museum. He co-curated the online exhibition “Diakaridia Traoré: Exploring Mali’s Religious Cultures” with Dr. Victoria Rovine
Lilli Skye Treppel
Educational History: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, BA in Art History, 2023
Lilli is a dual degree Master’s candidate with the school of Library Science and Art History. Her research interests lie within late nineteenth century and early twentieth century European art, with a special interest in archival and museum studies. Lilli was awarded an Akers Fellowship for the 204-2025 Academic year.
Hannah G. Williams
Educational History: University of North Carolina at Wilmington, BA, Art History and English Literature, Certificate in Professional Writing, 2018
University of Georgia, MA with Distinction, Art History, 2020
Hannah Williams is a PhD candidate specializing in late medieval and early modern Northern European art with Dr. Tania String. Her dissertation, “Miraculous Microcosms: Affective Piety and the Significance of Scale in European Devotional Micro-Sculpture, c.1400-1550,” examines the devotional experience afforded by the very small scale of tiny haptic sculptures from Northern Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Her MA thesis dealt with similar issues of the devotional experience of art and earned her a distinction from the University of Georgia. Prior to beginning her PhD, she spent a year as a curatorial intern for the European art collection at the North Carolina Museum of Art, and since joining UNC, she has been on the planning committee of the 2022 graduate symposium titled “Matters of Art: Materiality, Functionality, and the Agency of Art Objects” and was elected as the co-president of the Art Student Graduate Organization. In 2024, she will present research at the College Art Association conference in Chicago and the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, UK.
Noah Williams
Jihyun Yang
Educational History: Seoul National University, MA in Art History, 2021; Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Department of Philosophy, 2015 – 2016; Seoul National University, BA in Religious Studies and Media Arts, 2013 – 2018
Jihyun Yang is a second-year PhD student in Art History at UNC. She is particularly interested in researching the sensuous images produced during the early Renaissance in Germany and the Netherlands, exploring the psychological, and even physiological, responses of viewers to these passionate depictions. Jihyun aims to focus on the interaction and reactions of audiences to these provocative images using the lenses of phenomenology and cognitive science, especially examining the materiality and sensuality of sculptures. During her graduate studies at Seoul National University, she worked as a researcher at the Overseas Korean Cultural Heritage Foundation.
Weixin Zhou is a Ph.D. student in Art History. She is originally from Shanghai, China, and completed her undergraduate studies at Shanghai Normal University before earning an M.A. Degree in Creative and Media Enterprises in Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies at The University of Warwick in the U.K. Weixin’s main research interest is Western modern art, specifically European modernism and art movements in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is interested in the interdisciplinary approach of reflecting art and art history in the intellectual and cultural context.