M.A. Students

Claire Dempster is a second-year MA student in Art History. Her research interests include earthworks, performance and contemporary art practice. Her current project looks at the intersection between minimalism and memorial design. She has held internships at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Pulse Contemporary Art Fair and received her BA in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin. 

Jordan Dopp is a first-year MA student in Art History. After receiving her BA in Art History and Religious Studies from Furman University in 2015, she served as the Head Intern for the Artisphere Art Festival in Greenville, SC. A study abroad trip to Turkey, Greece, and Italy inspired her passion for Classical Antiquity and preservation. Her current interests of study are in mythological sculptural representations, museum ethics, and archival work with a specific interest in the methodological conservation and non-invasive study of ancient materials.

Margaret Hankel is a second-year MA student in Art History. She received her BA in art history from Columbia College Chicago in 2009 and worked as a freelance photographer and archivist in Chicago for six years before continuing her studies in art history at UGA. Her areas of interest include 19th- and 20th-century art, the history of photography, and the art and politics of the Weimar Republic. Her current research for the MA thesis concerns photography of New Objectivity.

Cicely Hazell is a first year MA student in Art History. After receiving her BA in Art History and French from McDaniel College in 2015, she taught English in Turkey through the Fulbright Program before coming to the Dodd. Her research interests reside in postmodern and contemporary art, including spectacle architecture, questions of public space, and social practice.

Abigail Kosberg is a first-year MA student in Art History.  She received her BA in Art History, German, and Studio Art from Lawrence University in the spring of 2016.  Her research interests include modern European art, with a particular focus on the art and politics of inter-war Germany and the Dada circle, and also midcentury American folk and outsider artists.

Franklin Lowe is a first-year MA student in art history. He received his BA in History from Samford University in the spring of 2016. His areas of interest include the fine, decorative, and applied arts of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Britain, especially works associated with race, class, gender and the spread of the British Empire. 

Kendra Macomber is a second-year MA student in Art History. Her current work examines depictions of class within Realist and early Impressionist art from the Nineteenth-Century. She was awarded the Congress-Bundestag Fellowship, and received her BA in Art History and German from Berry College. 

Ph.D. Students

Brooke Leeton is a Ph.D. candidate in contemporary art whose current research explores the tension between the unavoidability of death and the perennial fantasy of immortality, and the ways in which these inherently bound, yet opposing, ideas are expressed in contemporary art. Leeton examines art’s long-existing role in the attempt to grant immortality, but presses on the notion that, in spite of this endeavor, works of art are, in equal measure, reminders of one’s inevitable mortality. Leeton’s work considers this paradox as it is manifests in the work of, for example, contemporary artists Ryan Trecartin and Stelarc.

Lindsay Doty is a Ph.D. candidate at UGA where, in 2011, she received her Master's with the thesis, “Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint Jerome in the Wilderness: An Image of Spiritual Beauty.”  Lindsay’s current research focuses on rare images of the Virgin as an old, haggard mother that were made in Italy between circa 1350-1550.  She is interested in when and why these images occurred during the Italian Renaissance and how Marian theology may have influenced their creation. In 2015, Lindsay taught with the UGA Study Abroad Program in Cortona, Italy, and she is currently a teaching assistant at UGA instructing an art history survey course covering Paleolithic art to the Renaissance.

Beth Fadeley is a PhD candidate specializing in American art. Her dissertation, currently in progress, examines how American paintings of the domestic interior functioned in relation to cultures of U.S. imperialism around the turn of the twentieth century. Beth received her BFA with Art History Emphasis from the University of North Carolina in 2005 and her MA in Art History from the University of South Carolina in 2010. She has held positions at the Mint Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Erin McClenathan (M.A. Art History, 2013) is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Modernism and filmic media. Her doctoral dissertation, “Handheld Cinema: the Ephemeral Photographic Avant-Garde (1917-44),” focuses upon dada and surrealist periodicals to show how the photographs and photomechanical reproductions published therein were distinct aesthetic vehicles for both movements. A related essay, “Hans Richter’s Rhythmus Films in G: the Collective Cinematographic,” appears in In Visible Culture 24, “Corpus”. McClenathan has also been selected to present her work as part of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies congress as well as multiple graduate symposia.

Megan Neely is a Ph.D. student focusing on Late Renaissance and Baroque art. Her current project explores the relationship between artists and patrons in the execution of copies as diplomatic gifts. She holds a MA in art history from the University of Georgia, which considered similar themes in Federico Barocci's Aeneas Fleeing Troy. She also holds a BA in art history from Georgia Southern University, where she also minored in Classical and Medieval Studies.

Laura Lake Smith is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern and Contemporary Art History. A 2015–2016 recipient of a Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, she is currently writing a dissertation on the serial art of the American artist Richard Tuttle. Her research interests focus on a wide range of art, including nineteenth-century photography, twentieth-century abstraction, and early twenty-first-century installation and video.

Alev Turker is a Ph.D. candidate with particular interest in Late Antique and Byzantine Art and Architecture. She received her BA and MA degrees in Art History at Hacettepe University and participated in the Great Palace (Palatium Magnum) excavations in Istanbul and several other excavations at Cappadocia, Turkey. She completed her second MA degree at UGA, working on a Middle Byzantine rock-cut structure in Cappadocia, with the thesis “Space and Image: The Meaning of the Wall Paintings of the Hermitage of Ioannes.” Her current research focuses on the transformation of the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, into the Ottoman capital, Konstantiniyye. She examines the physical, political, and cultural shifts mirrored in the cityscape through archaeological evidence and historical accounts of the Late Antique and 15th and 16th centuries. She taught Art History Survey I, covering Paleolithic art to the Renaissance, at UGA between 2014 and 2016. She is now the research assistant for UGA projects focusing on Late Antique works of art.