Profile

Josephine O’Neil is a Ph.D. student specializing in Chinese art history. She is interested in the development of figure painting in China with a particular focus on depictions of maladies, misfortunes, and poverty, as well as pictorial representations of acts of compassion in secular contexts. She is also interested in how artists of the post-dynastic era explore these themes in painting and photography.

Josephine earned a B.A. in Art History from Barnard College (2017). She then spent two years engaged in intensive language study at the International Chinese Language Program in Taipei and the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies in Beijing. She received an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University (2022). Her master’s thesis examined the painting practice of contemporary multimedia artist, Zheng Chongbin.

Josephine has held internships in the Asian Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Shanghai History Museum. Before coming to Princeton she was a member of the inaugural class of the Cheng-Harrell Graduate Internship program at the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington D.C.