Art History

During Heghnar Watenpaugh’s recent academic residency in Paris, the Louvre, the city’s most famous art museum, was continually in headlines even here in the U.S.

The launch of Professor John López’s new book The Aquatic Metropolis: Urban Design and Environmental Change in Tenochtitlan-Mexico City (Pennsylvania University Press) starts on June 26 with a virtual book talk sponsored by The Association of Latin American Art.

Professor Katharine Burnett has published a new article on the artist Wu Bin in the journal Word and Image. In “Mediated meaning of a magnificent rock: using Wu Bin’s words to understand his painting Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock,” Burnett examines the late Ming Originalist artist Wu’s intentions through an analysis of the artist’s inscriptions, colophons and similarly commissioned painting On the Way to Shanyin.

On June 7, Professor Katharine Burnett explored Yixing teapots and the discourse of originality with the San Francisco Ceramics Circle. She presented “The Marvelously Inventive 17th-Century Chinese Teapot (and Some of Its European Descendants)” at the Gunn Theater in the Legion of Honor, San Francisco to the San Francisco Ceramics Circle, an affiliate organization of ceramics enthusiasts connected to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Professor Talinn Grigor has been awarded a fellowship by The Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University. She will be a Visiting Fellow from January to April, 2027. Professor Grigor will be working on her project Of Hyphenated Architects which examines the role of hyphenated and diasporic Armenian architects and artists in the global circulation and connectivity of the Modern Movement.

Professor Talinn Grigor will participate in the 2026 Cultural History of Asian Art Conference at the University of Hong Kong on June 24. Professor Grigor will discuss “Postcards, Hotels, and Hospitable Minorities: Armenian and Parsi Urbanity Networking a British Empire” for a panel exploring urbanity.

Each year, UC Davis undergraduates in all academic fields are invited to submit an abstract and participate in the Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Activities Conference. This year, art history was well represented with six majors presenting research papers in Oral Session 2 on Saturday, April 25.

Professors Talinn Grigor and co-author Houri Berberian are the 2026 recipients of the Western Association of Women Historians’ Barbara “Penny” Kanner Award for excellence in the use of primary sources. The award acknowledges the achievements of scholars whose books, book chapters, articles, or published electronic media illustrate the effective and impressive use of a specific set of primary documents such as diaries, letters and oral histories. Grigor and Berberian’s

Professor Katharine Burnett recently attended the Global Tea Conference at the University of Virginia where she participated in the Tea and Material/Visual Culture session to discuss “Teapots Shaped by Cultural Forces: 17th-Century Art Theory and Innovative Yixing Teapot Design.”

Professor John Lopez’s new book The Aquatic Metropolis: Urban Design and Environmental Change in Tenochtitlan-Mexico City (Penn State University Press) is a nuanced account of Mexico City’s urban development and Aztec and Spanish attempts to control its most iconic feature–water.