The subject of Ohadi-Hamadani's dissertation: Aubrey Williams, Heraldry at York (1961)
Doctoral candidate in Art History Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani is recipient of the 2019 Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). Housed within YCBA’s Division of Research, Exhibitions and Publications, the postdoctoral research position is primarily engaged in the development of scholarly programs, in particular the annual graduate student symposium, and provides support and research assistance for the development of exhibitions curated by the Deputy Director of the Division, which will concentrate on twentieth-century British art.
Ohadi-Hamadani’s current doctoral research, which intersects and supports many of the initiatives and exhibitions that YCBA is organizing in the coming years, made her a uniquely qualified candidate. Her dissertation project provides a contextual, sociopolitical history of postwar British abstraction between 1948-1972 through a series of case studies examining institutional and exhibition practices of London venues the Commonwealth Institute, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, New Vision Centre and the role of visual arts in the Caribbean Artists Movement.
“I am already thinking about how to integrate my knowledge of conservations research into programming,” writes Ohadi-Hamadani. “Likewise, I’m considering how I might use the Center’s institutional archives to analyze its own history of non-western exhibiting practices; researching the representations of North American Indians in British art; and organizing community outreach in New Haven."