Predoctoral Fellows and Interns

Anna Dumont
Mellon COSI Research Fellow, Textiles

Anna Dumont (she/her) is a COSI Research Fellow and an eighth-year PhD candidate in art history at Northwestern University. Her dissertation, “From Design Reform to Fascist Craft: Gendered Labor and Italian Textiles 1870–1945,” is advised by Rebecca Zorach and traces how women’s textile work came to be variously defined as industrial work, domestic labor, and fine art in the period of Italian industrialization. Anna’s work engages the social histories of female lacemakers, weavers, and seamstresses whose work is often unaccounted for in the attribution of textile objects. Her research has been supported by the Gladys Kreible Delmas Foundation, the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the American Academy in Rome. Anna will be mentored by Melinda Watt, Chair and Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator in Textiles.

Jenny Harris
Mellon COSI Research Fellow, Modern and Contemporary

Jenny Harris (she/her) is a COSI Research Fellow and a fourth-year PhD student in art history specializing in 20th-century art at the University of Chicago, where her primary advisor is Christine Mehring. Her research explores global modernism with particular interests in abstraction, craft and design, and intersections of dance and visual art. Her writing has appeared in several catalogues, Artforum, and the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas. From 2013 to 2019 she worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where she contributed to the galleries’ reinstallation and the exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends (2017) and co-organized The Shape of Shape, Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman. Before that, she held positions at the Musée du Louvre, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Jenny will be mentored by Caitlin Haskell, the Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator in Modern and Contemporary Art and director of Ray Johnson Collections and Research.

McKenzie Stupica
Mellon COSI Research Fellow, Architecture and Design

McKenzie Stupica (she/her) is a COSI Research Fellow and a sixth-year PhD Candidate in art history at Northwestern University. Her research interests include the history of modern design and architecture, design education, and comparative and non-Western modernisms. Her dissertation, “Making Ulm Work: Latin America’s Experiments in Design Pedagogy, 1958–1973,” intertwines research on the post–World War II German design school, the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, with an examination of pedagogical models that shaped design and architecture in Latin America. Prior to her graduate studies, McKenzie worked for a Minneapolis-based arts organization and spent two years in Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship. McKenzie will be mentored by Irene Sunwoo, John H. Bryan Chair and Curator, and Alison Fisher, Harold and Margot Schiff Curator of Architecture and Design.

Yifan Zou
Mellon COSI Research Fellow, Arts of Asia

Yifan Zou (she/her) is a COSI Research Fellow and a sixth-year PhD candidate in art history at the University of Chicago where her primary advisor is Wu Hung. A specialist in late imperial Chinese art and architecture, Yifan’s dissertation, “Competing for Fame: Iconic Timber Pavilions in Chinese Art and Visual Culture,” investigates the development of this genre across artistic mediums since the Tang dynasty, and seeks to disclose the complex interrelationships between architecture and representations. Her forthcoming article “Pyramids, Mountains, and Sightlines: The Diachronic Evolution of Teotihuacan’s Monumental Structures” (co-authored with Claudia Brittenham), engages research across the conventional divides between image, object, and architecture. Yifan will be mentored by Tao Wang, Pritzker Chair of Arts of Asia, executive director of initiatives in Asia, and curator of Chinese art.

Sarah Estrela Beck
Mellon Foundation COSI Research Fellow, Photography and Media

Sarah Estrela Beck is a Mellon Foundation COSI Research Fellow and a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, where, advised by Professor Huey Copeland, she specializes in modern and contemporary art with a focus on the African diaspora. Her dissertation, “Diffracting Future Fictions: Visual Resistance in Portuguese Africa, 1961–1974,” analyzes the exposures and inversions of fascist and imperial visual devices in the works of artists from Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé e Princípe, Mozambique, and Portugal during their liberation struggles. In Photography and Media, Sarah is working with Matt Witkovsky, the department’s Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator and vice president for strategic art initiatives, and associate curator Antawan Byrd on an upcoming exhibition of 20th-century pan-African art.

Arianna Ray
Mellon Foundation COSI Intern, Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Arianna Ray holds the Mellon Foundation COSI Internship in Painting and Sculpture of Europe and is a third-year doctoral student in art history at Northwestern University. Arianna is studying early modern northern European art with Claudia Swan and Rebecca Zorach. Arianna’s dissertation, “Black Skin, White Paper: Art, Africans, and the Construction of Race in the Early Modern Dutch Atlantic World,” investigates the depiction of Africans in prints and drawings produced in the Netherlands, Brazil, and Suriname, and the compositions’ transmedial circulation in paintings, tapestries, and decorative arts, in order to analyze the role of art, materiality, and medicine in the epidermalization of race. She holds a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. During her internship, Arianna will collaborate closely with Jacquelyn Coutré, Eleanor Wood Prince Associate Curator.

Yunfei Shao
Mellon Foundation COSI Research Fellow, Arts of Asia

Yunfei Shao is a Mellon Foundation COSI Research Fellow and PhD candidate studying the visual representation of place in late imperial China at the University of Chicago. She received her BA in art history from Hong Kong University (2011) and her MA in art history from the University of Chicago (2012). Her dissertation, “Re-implacement and (dis)placement: Representing West Lake from the 13th to the 19th Century in China,” considers the image of a place as a constructed concept filtered through a sensibility characterized by tourist boom, construction of local identity, and imperial appropriation in pre-modern China. Her areas of interest also include print and book culture, Japanese paintings of the Edo period, and image-text relationship. For her fellowship, Yunfei will be mentored by Colin Mackenzie curator of Chinese art.

Yin Wu
Rhoades Foundation Curatorial Intern, Applied Arts of Europe

Yin Wu is a Rhoades Foundation Curatorial Intern and a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, where her primary advisor is Wei-Cheng Lin. She specializes in Sino-Euro artistic exchange and visual culture in 17th- and 18th-century China. Her doctoral dissertation, “Transforming the West: Western Objects in the Imperial Court of the Qianlong Emperor, 1735–1796,” explores the cross-cultural exchange of objects between China and the West at the Qianlong Emperor’s court in the 18th century. Her dissertation project investigates how Western objects were transformed into new visual and material forms and created new political and cultural meanings in the Qing empire. This year, Wu will be mentored by Jonathan Tavares, associate curator of Applied Arts of Europe.

Sylvia Wu

Mellon Foundation COSI Research Fellow, Arts of Asia

Sylvia Wu is a Mellon Foundation COSI Research Fellow and a fifth-year doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago working primarily with Persis Berlekamp. A historian of medieval Islamic art and architecture, Sylvia is particularly interested in the material culture of China’s maritime Muslim communities. In her dissertation, “Mosques of Elsewhere: Tale and Survival of Muslim Monuments in Medieval Coastal China,” she examines China’s mosque architecture and the tradition’s engagement with legendary monuments of the Indian Ocean network. The project seeks an alternative approach to transculturation and highlights the role of narrative in identity building. Apart from her dissertation, Sylvia is also developing a research project on the representation of architectural space in the Islamic painting tradition. At the museum, Sylvia will be mentored by Madhuvanti Ghose, Alsdorf Associate Curator of Indian, Southeast Asian, and Himalayan Art. 

Olivia Dill
Mellon Foundation COSI Fellow in Prints and Drawings

A doctoral candidate in art history at Northwestern University, Olivia Dill studies 16th- and 17th-century scientific prints and drawings. She was COSI curatorial intern in the Prints and Drawings department, working with Prince Trust Associate Curator Jamie Gabbarelli. Olivia’s dissertation investigates the labor and materials relied upon in the procurement, observation, and depiction of insects in the early modern Atlantic world. She considers the work of several Dutch and English naturalists, including Maria Sibylla Merian and others. Olivia’s art historical work leverages her background in physics and cultural heritage digitization. She aims to apply non-contact imaging techniques to measure pigment composition and surface shape in prints and drawings.

Hanne Graversen
Rhoades Foundation Curatorial Intern in Textiles

Hanne Graversen joined the Department of Textiles under the mentorship of associate curator Erica Warren to work on a curatorial project examining post-WWII Scandinavian art and design objects through an ecological lens. Hanne is a PhD candidate in modern and contemporary art history at the University of Chicago, whose work explores ecological and social issues at the intersection of art, design, and environment. Her dissertation “Interchanges: Construction of the US Interstate Highway System and Artistic Practice, 1956–1984” considers artworks across a range of media, materials, and processes to unearth how the decades-long Interstate construction irrevocably altered not just the American landscape, but also the contours of art in America. She is committed to transforming the field to create more inclusive histories, practices, and institutions.

Sandra Racek
Mellon Foundation COSI Fellow in European Painting and Sculpture

Sandra Racek is a doctoral candidate in art history at Northwestern University researching Dutch and Flemish art of the 16th and 17th centuries. Her dissertation examines artworks portraying specific narratives featuring the themes of male-female cross-dressing and asks how they engage with 17th-century debates on appearance and reality with regard to images. Her broader research interests include visual culture of Europe from 1400 to 1700, artistic exchange, court collecting, and the dynamics of viewership, gender, and identity. As the 2020-2021 COSI Research Fellow for Painting and Sculpture of Europe, Racek worked with curator Jacquelyn Coutré on researching provenance, conservation, and publication history for a catalogue of Dutch and Flemish paintings within the Art Institute’s collection.

Xi Zhang

Mellon Foundation COSI Advanced Writing Fellow

Xi Zhang is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Chicago. Her research field focuses on the history of modern Chinese art and architecture. Xi’s dissertation examines the urban and cultural transformation of Shanghai through the lens of garden spaces during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Prior to this year, she had been an intern with the Art Institute of Chicago’s Arts of Asia department and assisted with the development of the exhibition Mirroring China’s Past: Emperors and Their Bronzes. In 2017–18, Xi held a joint fellowship between Arts of Asia and Applied Arts of Europe on the research of Chinese export porcelains. During the 2020–21 year, Xi worked on a project of Shanghai School paintings with Tao Wang, Pritzker Chair of Arts of Asia, executive director of initiatives in Asia, and curator of Chinese art, and Colin Mackenzie, curator of Chinese art.

Meng Zhao 
Mellon Foundation COSI Fellow in Arts of Asia

Meng Zhao is a PhD candidate studying Chinese art with a particular focus on painting practice of the middle period (about 800–1400) at the University of Chicago. Her doctoral dissertation investigates the related ways in which major landscapists from the end of the 11th to 14th century turned their attention to the portrayal of human presence and responded in various efforts to the psychological dimension of figure-landscape relationships. Under the mentorship of both Tao Wang, Pritzker Chair of Arts of Asia, executive director of initiatives in Asia, and curator of Chinese art, and Colin Mackenzie, curator of Chinese art, Meng assisted the department of Arts of Asia with the digital project on Chinese paintings while conducting research on pictorial representation of beautiful women and its relation to the mingling of senses.

Maggie Borowitz
Mellon Foundation COSI Research Fellow in the Department of Modern and Contemporary

Maggie Borowitz is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Chicago and a 2020–21 Fulbright-Hays fellow. Her research focuses on the relationship between art and politics in late 20th-century Latin America with special emphasis on conceptual practices in Mexico and Brazil. Engaging with theories of affect and feminism, her dissertation, entitled “Caught by Surprise: Intimacy and Feminist Politics in the work of Magali Lara,” considers alternative forms of political art in 1970s and ’80s Mexico City. At the Art Institute, Maggie was the 2019–20 Mellon COSI Research Fellow in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, where her research centered on Surrealist practices in Latin America. Her COSI research served as the backbone for her essay “Figuring Differently: Surface and Substance in the Paintings of Alice Rahon,” which appears in the catalogue Alice Rahon (San Francisco: Gallery Wendi Norris, 2021).

Jessica Hough
Mellon Foundation COSI Curatorial Intern in the Department of Photography and Media

Jessica Hough is a doctoral student in art history and a Mellon fellow in gender and sexuality studies at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on late 20th-century art, with an emphasis on video and “new” media, performance, activist art, feminist historiography, and queer theoretical approaches to art history. She holds a bachelor’s degree  from the University of Chicago, a master’s degree in film studies from Columbia University, and a master’s degree in art history from the University of Pennsylvania. Jessica has worked in curatorial, archival, and educational capacities at institutions including the Smart Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Electronic Arts Intermix, and Artists Space. Her writing can be found in online publications such as the Rutgers Art Review, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues. She was the 2019–20 COSI Mellon curatorial intern in the Department of Photography and Media at the Art Institute.

Jacob Henry Leveton
Mellon Foundation COSI Curatorial Research Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings

Jacob Henry Leveton studies visual culture, critical theory, and ecology from the late 18th-century through the present, and was the 2019–20 Mellon COSI Curatorial Research Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute. In spring 2021, he will defend his PhD dissertation, “William Blake’s Radical Ecology,” at Northwestern University. Leveton’s recent publications include “The Politics of Breath,” as part of the Empty Gallery, an experiment in virtual objects study at the Art Institute; and “Seeing Ecology: Pollination and the Resistance to Adam Smith’s Theory of Political Economy in William Blake’s Book of Thel,” which appeared in the special “Green Issue” of Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal. To learn more about his research, teaching, and curatorial work, please visit his website.

Chloé M. Pelletier
Mellon Foundation COSI Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Chloé M. Pelletier is a graduate curatorial intern in the National Gallery of Art’s Department of Sculpture and Decorative Arts. She earned her bachelor’s degree in art history from Johns Hopkins University and is currently completing her doctorate at the University of Chicago. She specializes in Italian Renaissance art and the cultural history of the environment. Her research and teaching draw upon environmental studies to generate new approaches to European art and situate it more fully within its global context. Chloé’s work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Center for Curatorial Leadership. At the Art Institute of Chicago, she held a 2019–20 COSI Mellon fellowship in the Department of Painting and Sculpture of Europe.

Zhiyan Yang
Rhoades Foundation Curatorial Intern in Arts of Asia

Zhiyan Yang is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Chicago. He specializes in the history of modern and contemporary East Asian architecture and is currently writing a dissertation on post-socialist architecture in China and its various cultural applications and reflections, including exhibits, journals, history writing, and its intersection with contemporary visual culture and art. While holding the Rhoades Curatorial Internship at Art Institute of Chicago in 2019–20, he curated a painting rotation titled  “Transcribing Personal Thoughts and Feelings: Chinese Landscape Paintings from the Sixteenth Century to 2017.” Zhiyan is now based at home in Chicago, focusing on finishing his dissertation. He recently published an exhibition review entitled “The Ubiquitous Interface: Reviewing Painted Screen—Past and Future” in the second issue of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. 

The Empty Gallery
In March 2020, because of the pandemic and the temporary museum closure, our 2019–2020 COSI predoctoral fellow cohort had to transition much of their fellowship experience to a remote platform. As a result, they developed new strategies, turned to different resources, and advanced their research in ways they didn’t expect earlier in the year. The Empty Gallery is a product of their work—a virtual space to explore how they learned to meaningfully engage with art objects without physical access to them.

Hanne Graversen
COSI Research Fellow in Architecture and Design

Hanne Graversen is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation “Interchanges: Construction of the US Interstate Highway System and Artistic Practice, 1956–84” examines how the transforming landscape of the country’s interstate became both a medium and an object of inquiry for artists in the period. As a graduate fellow of the 2017–18 Mellon Sawyer Seminar in Urban Art and Urban Form at the University of Chicago, she co-organized three symposia with Bill Brown and Jessica Stockholder, inviting speakers such as Rahul Mehrotra and Amanda Williams to join discussion on art, architecture, and landscape. As a contemporary curatorial intern at the Smart Museum, she assisted Laura Letinsky and Jessica Moss on the exhibition There Was a Whole Collection Made: Photography from Lester and Betty Guttman, co-editing and contributing to the catalogue. Her work has been supported by the Getty Research Institute and the Schiff Foundation Fellowship for Critical Architectural Writing. In 2018–19, Graversen was a COSI Research Fellow in the Department of Architecture and Design, mentored by Zoë Ryan, John H. Bryan Chair and Curator, and Alison Fisher, Harold and Margot Schiff Associate Curator.

Brian T. Leahy
COSI Graduate Intern in Modern and Contemporary

Brian T. Leahy is a PhD student in art history at Northwestern University specializing in modern and contemporary art. His research focuses on art in the United States during the 1980s, with a particular interest in the role of public relations practices for artists and art institutions. He holds a BA in studio art and religious studies from Davidson College and an MA in modern and contemporary art history, theory, and criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he also served as a graduate curatorial assistant at the Sullivan Galleries. At Northwestern, his research has been supported by a Mellon Cluster Fellowship in Rhetoric and Public Culture, and in 2018–19 he held the COSI Graduate Internship in the Art Institute’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art under the direction of Caitlin Haskell, Frances Comer Curator of International Modern Art.

Scott David Miller
COSI Research Fellow in European Decorative Arts

Scott David Miller is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University. His research focuses on the built environment and material culture of late medieval domestic spaces. His dissertation, “The Château, the Landscape, and the Building of the Social Edifice in Valois France,” investigates how late medieval French rulers and their courtiers used the acts of building, the adornment of spaces and landscapes, and the selective occupation of castles to perform aspects of their identities. Miller was a research assistant for the 2015 Block Museum exhibition Collecting Paradise: Buddhist Art of Kashmir and Its Legacies. He also co-authored Take This Ring: Medieval and Renaissance Rings from the Griffin Collection, which accompanied the 2015 Cloisters Collection exhibition Treasures and Talismans: Rings from the Griffin Collection. Miller’s research in French archives and château sites was funded by a 2016–17 Chateaubriand Fellowship. In 2018–19, he was a COSI Fellow under the direction of Jonathan Tavares, associate curator of Applied Arts of Europe.

Nancy Thebaut
COSI Research Fellow in Prints and Drawings

Nancy Thebaut is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Chicago studying medieval art and architecture. Her dissertation, “Non est hic: Figuring Christ’s Absence in Early Medieval Art,” studies images made 850–1050 in which Christ is visually absent or partially obscured from view. Nancy has spent much of her PhD in Paris, where she was a Kress Fellow at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (2015–17) as well as an intern at the Musée de Cluny and the Musée Carnavelet. While her research is primarily focused on art of the early medieval period, she is also interested in the intersections between medieval and modern art as well as 1970s feminist art; she worked for the artist Judy Chicago in Belen, New Mexico, prior to beginning her PhD. Nancy holds degrees from the Courtauld Institute (MA), Ecole du Louvre (M1), and Agnes Scott College (BA). In 2018–19, she was a COSI Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings.

Christine Zappella
COSI Research Fellow in European Painting and Sculpture

Christine Zappella is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation “Andrea del Sarto’s Monochrome ‘Life of St. John the Baptist’ and Monochrome Painting in Renaissance Florence” investigates the use of color by the city’s leading artists to comment on the shifting theoretical, theological, and political ideologies of Renaissance Florence. This past year she served as a fellow-in-residence at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max-Planck Institut, Florence, and she recently participated in the Mellon Summer Institute in Italian Paleography at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Prior to enrolling at University of Chicago, Zappella completed her MA in art history at Hunter College, and she served as a curatorial assistant in the Department of Old Master Drawing at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. In 2018–19, Zappella was a COSI Research Fellow in the Department of European Painting and Sculpture with Rebecca Long, Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Associate Curator, Painting and Sculpture of Europe.

Antawan I. Byrd
COSI Research Fellow in Photography

A doctoral candidate in art history at Northwestern University, Byrd focuses on modern and contemporary art of Africa and the African Diaspora. His dissertation, “Interferences: Sound, Technology, and the Politics of Listening in Afro-Atlantic Art,” examines how artists in Bamako, Port of Spain, and New York combined sound and visual technologies to engage profound moments of political change in the 20th century.

Laurel Garber
COSI Curatorial Intern in Prints and Drawings

A PhD student in art history at Northwestern University, Garber studies histories of printmaking and print culture in early modern and 19th-century France.

Solveig Nelson
COSI Research Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art

A PhD candidate in art history at the University of Chicago, Nelson’s dissertation, “The Whole World is (Still) Watching: The Televisual, Early Video Art, Nonviolent Direct Action, 1930s–70s” positions early video art as an aesthetic response to television played out in multiple media, thus opening up arenas of action, vision, and thought not previously counted within the history of video.

Xi Zhang
COSI Research Fellow in Asian Art and European Decorative Arts

A doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Chicago, Zhang is completing her dissertation, “Mapping Entertainment Spaces in Changing Shanghai, 1850s–1920s,” which explores the role of entertainment spaces in the construction of distinct cultural identities in imperial-republican transitional Shanghai.

Jadine Collingwood
COSI Research Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art

A doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Chicago, Collingwood is working on her dissertation, “‘A Tragic Suburban Mentality’: Managerial Lyricism in Contemporary Art,” which considers the work of Liam Gillick, Matthew Barney, and Pierre Huyghe within the context of 90s-era neoliberalism and the development of networked communication technologies.

Anne Feng
COSI Research Fellow in Asian Art

A doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Chicago, Feng is completing her dissertation, titled “Waters on the Wall: Producing the Pure Land in 7th- to 10th- Century Mogao, Dunhuang,” a study of changing conceptions of cave space at Dunhuang.

Julia Oswald
COSI Research Fellow in European Painting and Sculpture

A doctoral candidate in art history at Northwestern University, Oswald is focusing on her dissertation, “Sachreliquien and the Rhetorics of the Real and Imagined Treasury, 1100–1600,” examining the growing range of iconographies developed to depict the relics of the Passion.

Emily Wood
Curatorial Intern in European Painting and Sculpture

A doctoral candidate in art history at Northwestern University, Wood studies the art and architecture of early modern Spain and Italy. Her dissertation research examines the artistic and political interactions between the Habsburg court in Madrid and the Medici court in Florence during the reign of Philip II (r. 1556–98).

John Murphy
COSI Research Fellow in American Art

A doctoral candidate in art history at Northwestern University, Murphy’s dissertation, “Back to the Garden: Craft, Modernism, and the Making of Woodstock’s Visual Counterculture, 1902–69,” traces how early 20th-century American Arts and Crafts colonies generated the artistic counterculture that we now associate with Woodstock, promoting antimodernist values of handicraft, community, and a reverence for the natural world against the alienation and exploitation of urban-industrial society.

Marin Sarvé-Tarr
COSI Research Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art

A doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Chicago, Sarvé-Tarr’s dissertation “Seizing the Everyday: Lettrist Film and the French Postwar Avant-Garde, 1946–1954,” studies how early Lettrist films by artists like Isidore Isou, Guy Debord, Yves Klein, Raymond Hains, and Jacques Villeglé participated in the French intellectual project of post–World War II reconstruction.

Jin Xu
COSI Research Fellow in Asian Art

A doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Chicago, Xu’s dissertation, “Picturing an Afterlife on Stone: Stone Mortuary Equipment and the Visual and Material Culture of Early Medieval China,” probes three key concepts: material, medium, and space in stone mortuary equipment from the Northern Dynasties (AD 386–589) and Sui (AD 589–618) periods, including sarcophagi and mortuary couches.

Aisha Motlani
COSI Curatorial Intern in European Painting and Sculpture

A doctoral candidate in art history at Northwestern University, Motlani studies 19th-century art, particularly British and French military and political imagery. She is in the early stages of research for her dissertation, which is tentatively titled “Visual Representations of the 1857 Indian ‘Mutiny’ in British Art.”

Nicola Cronin Barham
COSI Research Fellow in Ancient and Byzantine Art

A doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Chicago, Cronin Barham’s dissertation, “Ornament and Art Theory in Ancient Rome: An Alternative Classical Paradigm for the Visual Arts,” identifies an overlooked paradigm of visual culture in ancient Rome, one that celebrated the power of works of art to adorn their environment, conceptualizing them as ornamenta.

Jennifer Cohen
COSI Research Fellow in Photography

A doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Chicago, Cohen’s dissertation, “Surrealism and the Art of Consumption, 1924–69,” examines how, despite the movement’s early forays into French communism, surrealists approached the selection and organization of their artistic techniques as a process of “consumption.”

Maureen Warren
COSI Research Fellow in Prints and Drawings

A doctoral candidate in art history at Northwestern University, Warren’s dissertation, “Politics, Punishment, and Prestige: Images of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and the States Party in the Dutch Republic, 1618–1672,” analyzes works of art about domestic political disputes in the Northern Netherlands during the 17th century. 

Xinran Guo
COSI Research Fellow in Asian Art

A doctoral student in art history at Northwestern University, Guo studies modern and contemporary Chinese art, especially contemporary art in China during the 1980s and after. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “Afterimages of Socialism: Contemporary Chinese Art from 2000 to 2008”.