Current Student Research
Ginger Carlson
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
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.
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. 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 Culture
Simone Halliday-Shaw’s research looks at the history of the “bird guide,” from Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds in the late eighteenth century to the contemporary moment. Her project is supported by books and prints housed in the UofA’s Bruce Peel Special Collections library and the Art Gallery of Alberta.
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.
Lexi Kringle
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Kayla-Mae Matthew
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Hugo Plazas
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Hugo Plazas is working on the intersection of nationhood and racial organization in Colombian costumbrista painting, defined as paintings of people engaged in everyday life, created by local and travelling artists between 1810 and 1886. Most of the images he is studying are found in museum collections in London and Bogotá.
Ashna Rana
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Ashna Rana’s 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 delves 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.
Avelina Rathbone
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Sam Rittwage Scott
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Mingxin Ruan
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Mingxin Ruan is writing a thesis about socially engaged art and design in the Digua Community in Beijing — a community of migrant labourers located underground, in bomb shelters transformed into housing. Her research focuses on how sundry social groups, especially marginalized ones, participate in and promote open and equal dialogue and connect with community through co-design and participatory art projects.
Lucia Xun Wang
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Lucia Xun Wang researches contemporary calligraphy in the context of performance art. She examines how artists transform the theoretical mind-body relationship into physical action and use nontraditional media to question conventions of legibility, gender, and cultural authority. Her work highlights how material, gesture, and the body contribute to redefining calligraphy while preserving its cultural significance.
Amy Weber
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Qi Zhang
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Qi Zhang's research focuses on the emergence of Chinese surrealism in 1930s Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Tokyo.
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