Current Student Research
Moriah Crocker
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Moriah Crocker’s research is focused on craft and labour, with a special interest in artists who highlight both the care involved in creating art, and the everyday objects that surround us. Moriah uses time and documentation to make visible the previously unseen labour of crafting. Her own beadwork practice investigates how the perception and value of objects change, and are up for negotiation as the labour of the artist becomes focal.
Brittany Gergel
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Brittany Gergel observes fleas in Victorian images of gendered relationships. Prior to their understanding as a plague vector, fleas featured in a variety of early modern images as agents of entertainment and were commonly associated with women. These links sustained into the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, during which fleas were placed in gendered, sometimes fantastical relationships with each other and humans in souvenir arts, magazines, and erotica. Significantly, fleas in these engagements are visual: they are seen or unseen, or spectate human liaisons themselves. In this research, Brittany analyzes preserved dressed fleas, flea hunt cartoons, and illustrated flea erotica to ask how gender, sexuality, and looking are connected and iterated in Victorian fleas as long-historical subjects across countries and hosts. Their research considers objects and images as vital primary sources, expanding existing social flea histories through histories of science, sexuality and visual culture.
Skye Haggerty
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Skye Haggerty’s research interests are Indigenous material cultures, visual representations of land and “nature,” and needleworking. Their current work focuses on counter-beading as a creative act of resistance that complicates and visually disrupts the linear narratives of colonial borders and maps. Needleworking in the form of embroidery and beadwork is a historically gendered practice that weaves together tradition, cultural worldviews, and transmotion. Research-creation and methodologies emphasizing a “knowing-through-doing” perspective are central to their working method, as are principles of reciprocity in learning.
Simone Halliday-Shaw
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual CultureS
Justine Kohleal
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Justine Kohleal specializes in theories and practices related to contemporary art, museum
studies, and boredom. Her research explores post-industrial infrastructures across North
America and Europe that have been transformed into centres for art, culture, and
entertainment, paying close attention to the problems of embodiment posed by their
neoliberalization. Kohleal’s doctoral project utilizes curatorial strategies to ask whether
artworks that embody a generative boredom, such as those associated with stillness,
slowness, and repetition, may ‘glitch’ such infrastructures and provide the means for
thinking art spaces differently. In this way, her interdisciplinary dissertation aims to
provide avenues for reimagining the contemporary art gallery on both ideological and
practical levels. Kohleal received her MFA from OCAD University in Criticism and
Curatorial Studies and previously worked as a curator at The Power Plant Contemporary
Art Gallery in Toronto, Ontario. She is currently a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow.
Wei Lu
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Hugo Plazas
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Hugo Plazas focuses on the intersection of nationhood and racial organization in Colombian costumbrista paintings created by local and travelling artists between 1810 and 1886. Costumbrista painting is a visual genre that flourished in Ibero America from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, depicting the daily life and circumstances of various social groups through typified figures commonly known as types and customs (tipos y costumbres). In the construction of types and customs, artists usually placed single figures of individuals against a plain background to underscore bodily features and clothing as signifiers of a specific place, such as the charro in Mexico, the tapada in Peru, and the gaucho in Argentina. Hugo’s research centres on the development of this visual genre in Colombia between 1810 and 1886, a period that spans the creation of the first costumbrista images by prominent European travellers in Colombian territory to the highly influential and richly illustrated newspaper Papel Períodico Ilustrado. The aforementioned timeframe coincides with the period of Colombian nation formation, which extends from the beginning of the Independence movement to the emergence of Regeneration (a period of Colombian political history marked by the unification of national values). This coincidence is not random but rather evidence of the intertwined nature of visual arts production and debates about the imagined community that came to embody Colombian identity. Hugo is interested in unravelling the contribution of costumbrista artists established in Colombia to the formation of the racial ordering of the nation in the nineteenth century. Characterizing such contribution will serve to open up new avenues of research into the arts documenting, the future of their nations.
Ashna Rana
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Ashna’s research interests, which are varied and interdisciplinary, explore how art history intersects with other disciplines of fine arts and the humanities. Her main interest lies in late Victorian art, particularly Pre-Raphaelite photography, between the 1860s to early 1900s. She is keen to explore the understanding of morality as illustrated through images of childhood and other visual topics, including the medievalism of late Victorian art and photography. Her research will delve into the literary and historical references in the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron, and Lewis Carroll, among others, while exploring the influences of Italian culture on nineteenth-century British art.
Mingxin Ruan
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Mingxin Ruan is interested in socially engaged art that is related to ecological issues. She emphasizes the locality, interaction, and contemporaneity of artworks. Her research currently focuses on how social policies, religion, and technologies subtly influence environmental change, encouraging sundry social groups, especially marginalized ones, to participate in art making. Mingxin's larger research interests include social justice, power relations and postcolonial criticism. She aims to promote open and equal dialogue and encourage participants to connect with the community in the long term. She is also committed to mobilizing her art education background to enrich the research perspective by processing multidisciplinary collaborative activities.
Rojina Sebetiashraf
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Rojina Sabetiashraf, originally from Tehran, Iran, holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the University of Tehran. Her research explores the intersection of art, space, and culture, with a focus on museum studies, Iranian arts, and feminist theories. Rojina's Master's thesis examines women visitors' embodied experiences at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Her investigation captures the emotional and phenomenological aspects of these women's interactions with both art and space. By foregrounding the viewpoints of Iranian women, Rojina aims to decipher the intricate connections linking women's presence and involvement within the museum to the broader cultural narratives of Iran.
Elif Su Yilmaz
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Elif Su Yilmaz is interested in untangling the methodical construction of binary fallacies in the narratives that describe and/or are attributed to marginalized groups, as it is materialized in artistic form. Taking a transnationalist and transdisciplinary approach that stems from her personal experiences as an immigrant as well as her academic background in the fields of psychology and philosophy, Elif Su seeks to address how and why, apart from the economic mandates of late capitalist system, certain false consciousnesses are constructed and disseminated by various media apparatus in service of maintaining the status quo. Focusing primarily on contemporary performance art and art theory, her research aims to contribute to the empowerment of historically and contemporarily silenced voices in the collective effort to redress and reconcile past and present injustices.
Qi Zhang
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Qi Zhang's academic interests encompass cultural sociology, post-colonial theories, and the history of Chinese modern and contemporary art. Additionally, she engages with curatorial practices and art interpretation within the realm of museum studies. Her research endeavours delve into the evolution of art spanning the 20th century and beyond, with a particular emphasis on the context of post-colonial frameworks. In this pursuit, she meticulously examines the nuanced repercussions of cultural heritage and Western modernization on Chinese artistic expressions and societal dynamics. Zhang's analytical focus centres on Chinese modern and contemporary art, scrutinizing artworks as conduits of historical transformations and cultural responses. Her distinct focus resides in assessing the impact of the Euro-American-centred modern art paradigm on the roles assumed by artists within the Chinese art milieu. Furthermore, she also investigates the roles of museums and art galleries in presenting and interpreting Chinese contemporary art and broader East Asian artistic traditions.
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