MA Theses and Qualifying Papers
The University of South Florida's Tampa Library hosts the collection of published research online. Browse and read the collection of theses and dissertations by graduates of the School of Art & Art History.
2023
Stephanie Haas, “Fragmented Hours: The Biography of a Devotional Book Printed by Thielman Kerver”
Vera Reutova, “Negotiating Boundaries: Ivan Aivazovsky between the Russian and Ottoman Empires”
Susan Rimensnyder, “Fashioned for Here and There: The Divan Club Reveals Varieties of Cultural Cross-Dressing Portraiture”
Arianna Weber, “Ornamenting Time: The BMFA Ūd and Calligraphic Abstraction in Islamic Ornament”
2022
Madeline Axlund, "Partnership between Museums and Donors: Preserving or Defiling Cultural Heritage?"
John Fraunfelter, “Decolonizing the Kunstkammer: A Study of Material Narratives”
Vanessa Gillette, “The Limits of Consumption: Sawasa Ware In and Out of the Dutch East Indies”
Iris Gonzalez, “Anti-Authorial Calligraphy: Proverbs Out of Context in Hassan Massoudy’s Work”
Mia Reich, “Framing Kandinsky’s Painting with Red Spot (1914): Abstraction, Artistic Intent and Meaning Making in The Museum Space”
2021
Abigail Jensen, “The Ringling Psalter: Dating, Localizing, and Reconstructing a Mystery Manuscript”
Angela Finkbeiner, “A Critical Reevaluation of Mughal Portraiture: Empress Nur Jahan and Female Empowerment”
Azra Korajcevic, “Consumption of War through Art: The Meaning of Afghan War Rugs for their Producers and Consumers”
Claire Anderson, “The Geographical and Devotional Origins of the Life of the Virgin Triptych at the Cleveland Museum of Art”
Gina Lane, “The ‘Dancing Duo’ Composition in Mughal Painting and a Reevaluation of the History of the Kathak Dance Form”
Grace Baker, “Marginal Message, Monumental Meaning: The Hours of the Virgin in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves”
Tessa Artis, “Unutterable and Raging Desire: The Bride of Christ and the Canticum Canticorum”
2020
Gabriella Albritton, “Reconstructing the ‘Knyvett’ Manuscript: A Book of Hours Reminiscent of an English Past”
Emily Campbell, “A Blossoming Visual Language: The Hybridity of Indian Botanical Illustrations in the Works of William Roxburgh”
Will Russell, “Protectors of the Empire: The Talismanic Charms of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and the Ottoman Navy"
2019
Karla Aguayo, "Santa Monica and Her Augustinian Devotees: A Fifteenth-Century Manuscript of the Rule and Constitutions of Saint Augustine"
Richard Ellis, "Seeing King Solomon through the Verses of Hafez: A Critical Study of Two Safavid Manuscript Fragments"
Victoria Mann, "The Artist Births the Viewer: The Visual Experience of Kandinsky's 1913 Abstraction"
Zdislava Ungrova, "A Quiet Valley at Roztoky: Testimony of Singularity in the Landscape Imagery of Zdenka Braunerová"
Sara-Kay West, "Olafur Eliasson's Institution: Power, Reflection, and Gaze in his 2016 Versailles Project"
2018
Jeanie Ambrosio: Thesis “Mirror Images: Penelope Umbrico’s Mirrors (from Home Décor
Catalogs and Websites)"
Ashley Muraszewski, "Constructing the Identity of the Busts at the Umayyad Palace
of Khirbat al-Mafjar."
Mariana Gómez Fosado, "The Patent of Nobility in Favor of Gutierre Fernández de Agüero:
An Illuminated Manuscript Produced in the Reign of Philip III"
Erin Hughes, "The Creative Compilation of Langston Hughes: The Sweet Flypaper of Life"
2017
James Cartwright, "Crossing Boundaries. The Negotiation of Religious Space in Armenian New Julfa under the Safavid Empire (1603-1717)"
Alexandria Salmieri, "Revealing Criminal Justice in South Africa: The Photographic Works of David Goldblatt and Mikhael Subotzky”
Ashley Williams, "The Mosque Lamp of the Mamluk Ruler Karim al-Din within the Cross-Cultural Contexts of Abrahamic Traditions"
2016
Marlena Antonucci, “Cultural Soilscapes: Land Art in the Expanded Field”
Mary Gilpin, "Findings in the Friezes: Anila Quayyum Agha’s Intersections as an Experiential Hajj”
Andrea Johnson, “Incongruous Conceptions: Owen Jones’s Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of The Alhambra and British views of Spain”
Erin Wilson, “An Alternative Ancien Regime? Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun in Russia”
2015
Tracey Cole, "Empowering the Subject: A Re-interpretation of Marie Benoist’s Portrait of a Negress"
Laura Colkitt, "From Local to Global: Kama Wangdi Paints Bhutan's Changing Geopolitics"
Shanna Goodwin, "The Habits of the Grand Signor’s Court: Cross-Cultural Conversations and Aesthetic Exchanges in an Early Seventeenth Century Ottoman Costume Album"
Dave Loisel, "Searching for the Beloved: Rediscovering Homoerotic Representations in Ottoman Art"
Christopher Long, "'Here, I am a gentleman' — Albrecht Dürer’s Construction of Identities in the Self-portrait of 1498"
2014
Amanda Preuss, "Sarah Sze’s Triple Point: Modeling a Phenomenological Experience of Contemporary Life”
Alison Terndrup, "A Fez of the State: Late Ottoman Headgear in Official Portraiture"
2013
Erin Carter, “Holy Break, Holy Child: The Pseudo-Sacramental Performances of Margaretha Ebner”
Maureen Elizabeth Cox, “The Choir Books of Santa Maria in Aracoeli and Patronage Strategies of Pope Alexander VI”
Heather Linton, “Illumination and Victimization: Mental Illness in Paris and Abidjan”
Christy Paris, “Homage or Critique? How Grace Hartigan, Pat Steir, and Sherrie Levine use the Old Masters”
Kelly Simmons, “Maximilian I’s Pomegranates: A Solomonic Connection”
Elizabeth White, “Bold and Dangerous: Evaluating Marie-Antoinette’s Self-Fashioning”
2012
Jeffrey L. Boe, “Painting Puertorriqueñidad: The Jíbaro as a Symbol of Creole Nationalism in Puerto Rican Art before and after 1898”
Jean Carey, “Franz Marc as an Ethologist”
Jennifer Danielle McCall, “Renegotiating Identities, Cultures and Histories: Oppositional Looking in Shelly Niro’s This Land is Mime Land ”
Eileen Parotino, “Caravaggio's Mislabeled John the Baptist ”
Megan Voeller, “Narrating Ryan Trecartin”
2011
Lauren Branzei “Costumed Generalizations: Depictions of Women in Delacroix’s 1832 Moroccan Notebooks”
Terri N. Johnson “Cesare Vecellio’s Fantesche: Images of Servants and Working-Class Women in Early Modern Venice”
Maureen McGuire, “Bessarion's gift to Venice: a plea on behalf of Byzantium”
Valerie Palazzolo, “An Iconography of the Macabre’: Andreas Vesalius’ Animated Skeletons and the Memento Mori ”
Teresa Whitney, “Baron Talyor’s Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l'ancienne France and the Problematics of the Picturesque”
2010
Sabrina Hughes, “Empty Streets in the Capital of Modernity: Formation of Lieux de Mémoire in Parisian Street Photography from Daguerre to Atget” Winner of the 2010 Outstanding Thesis Award, USF Graduate School
2009
Melissa Diaz, “The Role of Materiality in Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Minus Objects (1965-1966)”
Susan King Klinkenberg, “An Intervention in Painting by Marlene Dumas with Titles of Engagement: Ryman's Brides , Reinhardt’s Daughter and Stern ”
Elizabeth Tanski, “Who Are the Danaides? Contextualizing the Use of the Individual in Rodin's Oeuvre”
Catherine Elizabeth Turner, “Self-fashioning, Consumption, and Japonisme: The Power of Collecting in Tissot's Jeunes Femmes Regardant des Objets Japonais , 1869”
2008
Shannon Annis, “A Further Removed Dissonance: Transformations of a Musical Model in Kandinsky’s Move Towards Abstraction”
Xiaoli Ma, “Double Resistance: Cai Guo-Qiang’s Cultural Melting Bath, Projects of the 20th Century (1997)"
Ryan Morgan, “Masculinity, subjectivity, and sexuality in Gustave Caillebotte's Young Man at His Window (1875)”
2007
Carrie Baker, “Re-Thinking the Myth of Perugino and the Umbrian School: A Closer Look at the Master of the Greenville’s Jonas Nativity Panel”
Katherine Kearney Bzura, “I'm Not Who I Was Then, Now: Performing Identity in Girl Cams and Blogs"
Michelle Rowland, “The European Utopian Socialists and the Capitalist Utopias of Walt Disney World”
Andrea Satterfield, “The Assimilation of the Indigenous American: A Broader Reading of Christoph Weiditz’s Trachtenbuch (1529) as an Ethnographic Document” Winner of the 2007 Outstanding Thesis Award, USF Graduate School
2006
Devon Larsen, “Rethinking the Monumental: The Museum as Feminist Space in the Sexual Politics Exhibition, 1996”
Elizabeth Oliver, “Vision and Disease in the Napoleonic Description de l’Egypte (1809-1828): The Constraints of French Intellectual Imperialism and the Roots of Egyptian Self-Definition” Winner of the 2006 Outstanding Thesis Award, USF Graduate School
2005
Izabel Galliera, “Negotiating Artistic Identity through Satire: subREAL, 1989-1999”
Lesley Treace Stone, “From Chapel to Chamber: Liturgy and Devotion in Lucantonio Giunta's Missale romanum , 1508”
H. Kellim Brown, “The Articulate Remedies of Dolores Lolita Rodriguez”
2004
Catherine Cottle, “The Myth of Narcissus and Abstract Expressionism, 1949-1959, and their Impact on Contemporary American Culture”
Laura Herrmann, “A Vocabulary of African Costume for Artists: The Woodcuts of Book X of Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo ”
2003
Marta Penabad, “Daughters in the Mi(d)st: Family Portraiture in 16th-Century Veneto”
2001
Anne Jeffrey, “(Dis)Embodying the Viewer in the Art of Mona Hatoum”
Peter Tush, “Salvador Dalì’s Identity Construction: Psychoanalysis, Ambiguity, Parody, and the Double” Winner of the 2001 Outstanding Thesis Award, USF Graduate School
2000
Robert Lovejoy, “The Working Class and Other ‘Races’: A Study in Culture and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century English Comic Strips”
Michelle McQuillan, “A Reinterpretation of Sandro Botticelli's Villa Lemmi Frescoes”
1999
Chika Okeke, “Critical Interventions: Obiora Udechukwu and Modern Uli Art”
1998
Patty Buster-Rhodes, “The Age of Totalitarianism: Women Printmakers of the Depression Era Respond”
Kathleen Swann Short, “The Collection: Giulio Clovio and the Stuart de Rothesay Hours”
1996
Karen Fraser, “A ‘Delicate’ Difference: The Critical Reception of Japanese Abstract Expressionism”
Editha Millington, “Manipulating Power, Adapting to Change: Kwifon Masquerade in the Cameroon Grasslands”
Kristen Parker, “Writing is not an Act of Love. Love is an Act of Writing: Guillaume de Machaut’s Le Livre Du Voir – Dit in Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, Fonds Français 1584, Les Oeuvres Complètes de Guillaume de Machaut ”
Traci Timmons, “Habiti Antichi et Moderni di Tutto Il Mondo as an Indicator of the Late Sixteenth Century Venetian Social Order”
Maria Perricone, “Narrative in the Illuminations of the British Museum’s Histoire Ancienne Jusqu’à Ceasar Royal 200.1”
1995
Catherine Abrams, “The Marriage Portraits of Colonel and Mrs. Walter Stewart: The Visualization of Separate Spheres”
Kelly Bousman, “A Poetry of Place: An Intertextual Study of Three Installations By Ann Hamilton”
Noel Smith, “Beyond Nostalgia: Photographs from the Burgert Brothers Collection 1920-1960”
Eileen Reilly, “The University of Florida Pigouchet and Vostre Horae: A Book Printed in Paris for Exports to London”
Helen Wheldon, “ A Critical Evaluation of the Term ‘Villa’ in Eighteenth Century England: a Case study of Chiswick”
1994
Sherri Hill, “Amazons, Matriarchs, and Space Babes: Images of Women in Science Fiction Films of the Fifties”
Hope Buchholtz, “The Political and Social Implications of Elizabeth Thompson’s Battle Paintings and Images of Ireland”
1993
Adrienne Golub, “Towards A Newer Critique: T.S. Eliot's Conservative Cultural Content and Bertolt Brecht's Aesthetics on Clement Greenberg's Early Rhetoric and Themes”
Jane Backstrom, “Linda Nochlin: Feminist Interventions in the History of Art”
1992
Eman Haram, “Family Photographs: The Aesthetics of Time”
1991
Xenofon Xeradakis, “The Riddle of Derived Motifs”
1988
Ann H. Albritton, “Sonia Delaunay’s Poster-Poems 1913-1916”