Congratulations to Yukina Zhang, ISAW Class of May 2024, on receiving the NYU University-Wide Outstanding Dissertation Award

Congratulations to Yukina Zhang, Assistant Professor of Art and Chinese Studies at Davidson College and ISAW Alumna Class of 2024, who has received the 2025 NYU University-Wide Outstanding Dissertation Award for Arts & Humanities. 

Yukina's dissertation, “Crafting Marriage in Afterlife: Art, Gender, and Power in Tang China, 618-907 CE,” explores the entanglement of gender and power behind the funerary art in spousal joint burials from 8th-century China. 

Her dissertation presents an art history of gender and power in China at the turn of the 8th century through the lens of marriage. Marriage in the scope of this research is not only an arrangement people once committed to during their lifetime, but also a continuation and reconstruction in their death. Husband-and-wife joint burials—concealed architectural space furnished with sculptures, mural paintings, stone carvings, and decorative arts—preserve, and, in some cases, reinvent the imagery of marriage through the elevation, erasure, and manipulation of funerary arts. 

The NYU University-wide Outstanding Dissertation Awards recognize exceptional doctoral dissertations in Arts & Humanities, Public Health & Allied Health, Science & Technology, and Social Sciences. The Arts & Humanities award category celebrates the research in fine arts, humanist disciplines, cultural studies, and theater, performance, and cinema studies. Each year, one award is given in the category of Arts & Humanities to recognize the dissertation’s academic and societal impact.

 A list of all 2025 awardees is posted on the main NYU website.