Molly Bernhard is a PhD candidate specializing in Renaissance art and the History of Collecting. Her dissertation “Plundering the Peninsula: Conquest and Collecting in Italy during the Early Modern Era (1494-1815), focuses on the History of Collecting through the lens of looting. Molly’s research seeks to reexamining and recontextualizing stolen artwork, their absorption into the cultural fabric of the aggressors, as well as the motives of their new owners, whether political or personal. Her archival research is supported by a 2024 fellowship at Temple University, Rome.  
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Hatice Koroglu Cam (she/her) is a first-year PhD student focusing on Italian Renaissance art. For three years, she studied Journalism and Art History at Istanbul University in Turkey. Hatice graduated summa cum laude from Rutgers University, where she obtained her B.A. in Art History in 2022.  

Her profound passion lies in the classical tradition, particularly in ancient sculpture and its influence on Renaissance art. Her undergraduate honors thesis, entitled “Decoding Michelangelo’s Passion: Laocoön and Tityus,” addressed Michelangelo's engagement with the Laocoon and...

Ivy D’Agostino is a second year master’s student on the research track. She researches art, objects, and architecture from the Early Modern period and focuses specifically on themes of embodied spirituality, materiality, cross-cultural collision, and religious syncretism, specifically in the context of colonial Latin America. In 2023, she was a co-curator for the exhibition The Art of the Book: Treasures from the Special Collections Research Center at Temple University’s Charles Library and published a video essay on Cesare Vecellio’s De gli habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del...

Miray Eroglu is a PhD student concentrating on Ottoman art and architecture and the Islamic world broadly. Her research interests span the 18th to 20th centuries, exploring urbanity, sites of sociability, performance, affect, gender, and sexuality, with a focus on the romantic and erotic. Miray holds a M.A. in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she wrote her thesis on depictions of couples in late 17th- and 18th-century Ottoman bazaar paintings, and a B.A. from McGill University. During her studies, she interned in the Islamic Art Department at the...

Ari Lipkis (he/him/his) focuses on Northern Italian architecture from Leon Battista Alberti to Vincenzo Scamozzi, from built works to drawings to theoretical treatises and printed matter. Ari’s research has been on the role of the fantastic or  fantasia, as well as mimesis, in the spread and development of new architectural innovations in the sixteenth century. Ari’s research examines architectural and urban vedute and their utilization by architects as statements about how they aligned their contemporary work with antiquity. Of particular interest are works that foretell the ...

Liam Maher (he/him) is a PhD candidate and Temple University fellow in art history. He received his M.A. in art history from the University of Oregon and his B.A. with honors in art history and political science from the University of Notre Dame. He specializes in 20th and 21st century Latin American & Latinx art with focuses on queerness and religion in Latin American art history. His dissertation, Queer Eschatologies: The Transubstantiative Impulse in Latin American Contemporary Art reflects on intersections of queerness, Catholicism, and anticolonialism in the work of...

Nicole Emser (she/her) is a PhD candidate studying the modern and contemporary art of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Her dissertation traces the systematic practices of ordering Caribbean land—from the colonial to the present—mapping the strategies contemporary artists use to repossess historical narratives, the land, and to create otherworlds of futurity. 
 
Her research and professional development have been supported by the Stanford University Libraries, the Huntington Library, the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale, the Clements Library, the French Colonial...

With a broad specialty in Latin American modern and contemporary art history, Camila Damico Medina (she/they)'s research focuses on the entanglements between art and technology, embodiment discourses, projects of modernity, and abstraction. Prior to resuming her doctoral studies at Temple University, she earned an MA in Communication Technologies and Aesthetics and BA in Cultural Production. Additionally, they received professional training in Media Art Preservation at the Danube University Krems, and in Preventive Conservation for Museum Collections and...

Joanna Platt is A PhD student specializing in modern and contemporary art history. Her primary interests are the representation of labor and the economics of art and production, especially regarding issues of class and social status. Joanna is currently researching Philadelphia’s connections to the Works Progress Administration-sponsored Fine Art Project, specifically issues of inclusivity in the Fine Print Workshop.

With a background in bronze casting and fabrication, Joanna balances an active studio practice with research and teaching. Exhibits of Joanna’s work have included...

Noah Randolph is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. His research focuses on the intersections of monuments and public art with issues of memory, race, and politics. Since 2019, Noah has been a member of the College Art Association’s Student and Emerging Professionals Committee, serving as chair from 2021-2023. Along with museum experience at the Speed Art Museum, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, his teaching experience includes courses taught at Temple University, West Virginia University, Ursinus College, and Moore College of Art and Design. He has presented his research internationally, and his publications include articles in Ruckus Journal, Arts, Journal of Historical Geography, and Transatlantica: revue d'études américaines.

M.A., Art History, Temple University, 2020
B.A., Art History, University of Louisville, 2016
A.A., Jefferson Community and Technical College, 2014

Advisor: Erin Pauwels, PhD

Danielle Degon Rhodes (she/her) is pursuing an MA in Art History with a concentration in arts management. She is an artist, curator, and arts administrator dedicated to improving public access to art and supporting contemporary artists in the creation of new works. Over the last 7 years, Danielle has worked alongside many artists and organizations in addition to co-owning and operating AUTOMAT Collective in Philadelphia. Her passion for arts infrastructure is rooted in the history of labor movements, government intervention, and her own experience as an artist. 

Danielle Degon Rhodes holds a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She attended the Summer Academy at the Salzburg Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria in 2022 and the Summer Institute at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Central, Hong Kong in 2018.  

Summer Academy, Salzburg Academy of Fine Arts; Salzburg, Austria 
Summer Institute, Tai Kwun Contemporary; Central, Hong Kong 
BFA in Sculpture, Temple University 

Primary Advisor: John Hatfield 

Brittany Rubin (she/her) studies print culture and the history of the erotic body in the Early Modern Netherlands. Prior to her matriculation, she worked at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, where she first served as a Kress Fellow and later as Print Room Curatorial Assistant. She also was a contributing co-author for the catalogue Lines of Inquiry: Learning from Rembrandt’s Etchings, which received the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr Award in 2019. She received a BA from Macalester...

Alexandra is a fourth-year PhD candidate specializing in Latin American art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her research interests include conceptualism, marxism, avant-gardism, and social practice, particularly as they address the intersection of human and environmental rights. Her dissertation “Groundwork: Alternative Pathways, Networks, and Sites of Resistance in Conceptualist Art from the Brazilian, Argentine, and Chilean Dictatorships, 1964-1990” reevaluates conceptualist, political art from the dictatorial periods of Argentina, Brazil and Chile through decolonial and ecocritical...

Jesse Rhianyu Sullivan (she/her) is an art history PhD candidate with an artist’s background. Her methodology prioritizes close looking, merging artistic, technological, and scientific approaches, while working alongside professional artists and mechanical engineers alike. She has worked and studied in Bologna, Florence, Venice, and London where she got her Master’s degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art. At Temple she has received a University Fellowship, the Marcia Hall Research Award, and the Departmental Temple...

Megan Voeller (they/them) is an educator, curator and writer whose work focuses on critical intersections of contemporary art and health. Their research explores how contemporary artists engage with concepts and practices of health, healing, and medicine, and on the reciprocal role of the arts and humanities in medical training.
 
Voeller has been Director of Humanities at Thomas Jefferson University’s health sciences campus in Center City, Philadelphia, since 2016. At Sidney Kimmel Medical College...

Gillian Yee (they/she) specializes in global contemporary art from 1980 to the present. With an emphasis on looking at art in the United States through a diasporic lens, their goal as a scholar is to explore and expand the realm of queerness, transness, and “non-normative” identities within the discipline, thereby circumventing a traditional canonical understanding of art history.

Yee received both their M.A. in Art History and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Georgia State University in 2021. Their research has been presented through various...

Piper Kozar-Meyers (she/they) is a first year MA student in art history with a focus in early Roman Imperial arts. She plans to mainly focus on numismatics, looking into the use of portraiture and symbolism as propaganda in the Roman sphere. Finishing her undergraduate career, Piper wrote her thesis on portraits of Julius Caesar and Emperor Augustus both in sculpture and on coins, and the symbolism and propaganda used to legitimize their seats of power.

Piper received her BA in art history with a minor in history in May of 2023 from Eastern Connecticut State University. There,...

Merve Koksal is a PhD student and University Fellow focusing on the intersections of modern art and culture with urban space, migration, cross-cultural exchange, and exile in late Ottoman Istanbul, particularly during the Allied occupation (1918-1923). Before joining Tyler’s Art History Department, Merve worked as a research assistant at Akdeniz University’s Painting Department (Antalya) for seven years. Since 2020, she has been involved in various interdisciplinary projects at the Orient-Institut Istanbul (Max Weber Foundation). One of these projects is the documentary film “Traugott,”...

Martina Merlo specializes in modern and contemporary art, with an intrinsically interdisciplinary approach to their research focus in the visual, sonic, spatial, material and performance cultures of contemporary “house-system” ballroom in the United States, 1980s to present. Particularly, Merlo intends to highlight Philadelphia’s unique culture, beginning from the Onyx Ball in 1989. In approaching this expressly Black and Queer art form, their media study will explore video, photography, and print ephemera as testimony. Merlo plans to bolster this research through cross-disciplinary...

Cecelia Heintzelman (she/they) is a first-year Art History MA student. They graduated magna cum laude with a BA in Ancient History and History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania in 2022. She is also the Collections Manager at the LaSalle University Art Museum in Philadelphia, PA. Previously, they worked as a Collections Assistant in the Penn Museum’s Mediterranean Section. She has assisted in curating several exhibitions, including the current exhibition at the LSUAM: Treasures of Immortality: Ancient Chinese Funerary Art (August 2023 - August 2025). Her research broadly...

Fernanda Senger (she/her) is a first-year PhD student in the field of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art, with a focus on modernist printmaking in Brazil and its relation to hemispheric and transatlantic networks in the first half of the twentieth century. Her research interests include drawing and prints in global modernisms, art and labor, migration, placemaking, ecocriticism, and indigenous studies. Before coming to Temple University, Fernanda was an educator teaching History and Humanities at a public high school in South Brazil, where she also engaged in many community...