UTD Art History

☄️Congratulations to 2026-27 Edith O’Donnell Graduate Fellow Brenda Vega, PhD candidate in Visual and Performing Arts Program at the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities and Technology!

📚 Dissertation: “Walking the Edges, Rewriting the Center: The Scarring Body in Latinx/Chicanx Performance Art”

My dissertation reconsiders the history of performance art in the United States by asking how Latinx/Chicanx women performance artists have reshaped art-historical interpretation by positioning the racialized and gendered body as a site of vulnerability, resistance, and visibility. I focus on three case studies—Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), Laura Aguilar (1959–2018), and Coco Fusco (b. 1960), widely recognized in contemporary art yet unevenly situated within performance genealogy. The central framework of this dissertation is what I have named The Scarring Body: Phenomenologies of Pain and Healing. Methodologically, I combine art-historical analysis, critical phenomenology, intersectional feminism, and Latinx/Chicanx studies to examine how these artists inscribe their bodies through performative actions, their documentation, and their reception. I recognize the scarring body as an ongoing process of memory, resistance, and endurance, rather than a resolved narrative of trauma or recovery in the lived experience of said performance artists.

🌟 Edith O’Donnell Graduate Fellowships are awarded to outstanding current Ph.D. students at UT Dallas, and support up to two years of dissertation work in art history. For more information about these fellowships, please visit our website: https://arthistory.utdallas.edu/fellows

☄️ Congratulations to 2026-27 Edith O’Donnell Graduate Fellow Maryam Takalou, PhD candidate in Visual and Performing Arts Program at the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities and Technology!

📚 Dissertation: “Landscaping: The Practice of Landscape in Contemporary Art”

In Western art, landscape emerged relatively late, around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, earning its epithet “child of history.” Rather than treat the landscape as a fixed image or backdrop, this dissertation repositions landscape as an active medium that mediates lived experience through its interaction with technology. Anchoring this analysis in the gerundive action of “landscaping,” it rejects the fragmentation of landscape into static or pluralized forms and instead emphasizes human–nonhuman relational experience shaped by perception. Focusing on works by Laleh Mehran, Terike Haapoja, and Heba Y. Amin, the study examines how optical and visionary technologies construct modes of visibility and reveal suppressed narratives across different contexts. Drawing on phenomenology and feminist theory, it rethinks landscape and lived experience beyond anthropocentric and territorial frameworks.

🌟 Edith O’Donnell Graduate Fellowships are awarded to outstanding current Ph.D. students at UT Dallas, and support up to two years of dissertation work in art history. For more information about these fellowships, please visit our website: https://arthistory.utdallas.edu/fellows

☄️ Congratulations to 2026-27 Edith O’Donnell Graduate Fellow Fatima Esmail, PhD candidate in Visual and Performing Arts Program at the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities and Technology!

📚 Dissertation: Fatima’s research focuses on the visual and material culture of Sindh (a region in present-day Pakistan) during the early medieval period under Arab Islamic rule. Through a close study of archaeological objects recovered from ancient-medieval sites of al-Mansura and Banbhore in Sindh, she explores diverse artistic influences – Islamic, Persian and Indic – and the trade and cultural networks that shaped the region. Through fieldwork and archival study, the dissertation adopts an object-led approach and culminates in the creation of a digital catalog documenting artifacts, many of which remain unpublished and scattered across provincial museums in Pakistan. Ultimately, it positions early medieval Sindh as a significant site of cultural confluence within global Islamic art history.

🌟 Edith O’Donnell Graduate Fellowships are awarded to outstanding current Ph.D. students at UT Dallas, and support up to two years of dissertation work in art history. For more information about these fellowships, please visit our website: https://arthistory.utdallas.edu/fellows

☄️NEXT WEEK: Join us for the fourth talk of the O’Donnell Institute’s 2025/26 Digital Cultural Heritage lecture series featuring the work of UTD scholars whose research overlaps with digital cultural heritage practices.

🗺️ “Mapping the World of Ibn Jubayr: A Twelfth-Century Traveler” with Dr. Ali Asgar H. Alibhai, Assistant Professor of Islamic Art History and Material Culture at the University of Texas at Dallas, and an affiliate of the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History

📆 Friday, April 24th, 11:00 am to 12:00 pm

📍Lobby steps of the Edith O’Donnell Arts and Technology Building (ATC LED Wall)
UT Dallas campus, 800 W. Campbell Road, Richardson, Texas 75080

🗾 This talk envisions new pedagogical methods for immersing researchers and students in multi-virtual and intersectional ways of engaging art historical, literary, and historical material. Dr. Alibhai, together with his research assistant Jonathan Lee, will present the MENARAH Initiative’s digital project on the Travels of Ibn Jubayr. Originally begun at MIT during Dr. Alibhai’s time as a Research Associate at the Aga Khan Documentation Center (AKDC), the project has since been further developed at UT Dallas. In its current form, the project demonstrates how mapping multiple dimensions of a text—such as a medieval travelogue—can open new pathways for interpretation, offering innovative ways of producing and experiencing knowledge.

☄️NEXT WEEK: Join us for a lecture with Dr. William Granara, research professor at Harvard University in the departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Comparative Literature.

✨ “Muslim Sicily: Daughter of Muslim Spain”

📆 Thursday, April 16, 6:00 pm

📍Jonsson Building, JO 3.601
UT Dallas campus, 800 W. Campbell Road, Richardson, Texas 75080

🗺️ Muslim Sicily has been compared to Muslim Spain (al-Andalus) since medieval times. This lecture seeks to identify both comparisons and contrast between these two remarkable histories and civilizations that stood at the crossroads of east-west encounters, i.e., Christendom and Islam, during the long centuries of a rich dynamic and multicultural pre-modern Mediterranean world that stood at the center of western civilization.

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☄️Fall 2026 graduate art history seminar:

📚 AHST 6322 Domestic Space on the Roman Bay of Naples

🌟 Dr. Michael Thomas

📆 Thursdays 1:00 – 3:45 pm

🏛️ This seminar will utilize the archaeology and visual culture from the many ancient sites along the Bay of Naples to explore the architecture, decorations, and social history of Roman-period domestic spaces. Contexts from both city and country will provide evidence for the study of the design, use, and rituals associated with the domestic sphere. We will look at opulent seaside villas, urban townhouses, and dwellings of ordinary people to study architectural design, decorative ensembles, slaves in the Roman house, dining and drinking, collecting and display, gardens and landscape, and domestic religion. Readings from both ancient and secondary sources will hance discussions and emphasize methodologies used to approach the Roman house.

[Image] Room 89, Oplontis Villa A, courtesy of Dr. Michael Thomas.

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Come hear UTD Art History alumna Mya Adams talk about her career post-grad!• Bass School Graduate Studies UT Dallas Join us for our Annual Alumni Spotlight 🌟
Hear from inspiring alumni, explore career journeys, and connect over a light reception. April 13 | 5–7 PM

The Graduate Studies Speaker Series highlights alumni as they share their current roles, career paths, and how their time at UT Dallas helped shape their professional journeys. The series offers insight into life after graduate school while fostering connection and inspiration across the community.

☄️Fall 2026 graduate seminar offering:

📚 VPAS 6300: What does it mean to be human? Proseminar in Visual and Performing Arts

🌟 Dr. Charissa Terranova

📆 Thursdays, 4:00 to 6:45 pm

🧬 Like all life, humans are kaleidoscopic entities. Art reflects this complexity, showing humans to have varied capacities and ways of being. Existence is site-specific and historical. Humans are interconnected to each other, other organisms, and the environment in which they live. Being human is thus singular and multiple, individual and collective, self and other. In short, to be human is to be nonhuman. Reveling in these truths, the class shows how art manifests many definitions of ‘life’ across time. It explores the question, “What does it mean to be human?” through methodologies of humanism, antihumanism, dehumanization, nonhuman lives, posthumanism, transhumanism, and radical humanism. Students study writings from the renaissance, enlightenment, Marxism, existentialism, neo-conservatism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, post-structuralism, and Orientalism. Grades are based on short essays, presentations, and individual participation in classroom discussions. While no prerequisites are required, students should be comfortable dialoguing about art, art history, philosophy, and theory.

[Image] Patricia Piccinini, “Big Mother,” 2005, human hair, fiberglass, silicone, leather.

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☄️Fall 2026 graduate art history seminars, continued!

📚 AHST 6334: The World of Orientalism

🌟 Dr. Ali Alibhai

📆 Tuesdays, 1:00 – 3:45 pm

🕌 This course examines the early modern formation of Orientalism in Europe as both an artistic and literary genre. Focusing on Orientalist painters and colonial representations of North Africa, it analyzes the tension between historical realities and the constructed images of Islamic society, culture, and civilization produced through European lenses. The course also interrogates how colonial worldviews generated particular forms of “medievalism,” shaping enduring perceptions of the Islamic past and informing how we see the world today. Students will engage in original scholarly research using the MENARAH Initiative’s Historic Islamic Cities Archive housed in the Eugene McDermott Library’s Special Collections, which spans the sixteenth through early twentieth centuries. This archive – including maps, ethnographic representations, prints, postcards, photographs, and related visual culture – provides a critical archive through which to examine the role of colonial thought and Orientalist frameworks in shaping representations of Islamic societies and their architectural histories.

[Image] Still from Disney’s “Aladdin,” 1992.

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☄️New Exhibition on display at the Crow Museum of Asian Art at UT Dallas!

🖼️ “Intersections: Photographs by Carolyn Brown”

🌟 Open until March 28, 2027

📍UT Dallas campus location, O’Donnell Athenaeum
777 Loop Road SW, Richardson, TX 75080

🌅 Dallas-based photographer Carolyn Brown draws on more than fifty years of documenting architectural sites around the world, originally inspired by the monumental wonders of Egypt. In this exhibition, she mined her photos to create new work in triptych – pairing images from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean to create visual dialogues across cultures, places, and time. Through these layered compositions, Brown invites viewers to reflect on the shared histories, forms, and intersections of religion and art history.

[Image] Hagia Sophia, 2015. Archival digital Giclée print, Carolyn Brown, American, born 1936. Courtesy of the Artist.

This exhibition was organized by the Crow Museum of Asian Art in collaboration with the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History. It was curated by EODIAH staff member Heather A. Bowling.

Crow Museum of Asian Art UT Dallas

☄️Fall 2026 graduate art history seminar offerings, continued:

📚 AHST 6327: Prints and Drawings

🌟 Dr. Mark Rosen

📆 Wednesdays, 1:00 – 3:45 pm

📰 This course will consider the functions, technique, and circulation of drawings and prints from Early Modern Europe to the present day. We will trace how the process and meaning of drawing evolved, the role of drawings in artistic training, the use of models (both artworks and live people), and the development of drawing in artistic academies. The course will also investigate how the development of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century impacted artistic culture through facilitating cheaply produced, widely circulating woodcuts, engravings, etchings, and printed books for popular consumption. We will discuss the types of works that were greatly in demand and the artists who chose to work in the new medium, and how the process and techniques of printing developed over the centuries since then.

[Image] Enea Vico, after Baccio Bandinelli, “The Academy of Baccio Bandinelli,” engraving, c. 1544.

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