Profile

Sasha Whittaker is a Ph.D. candidate studying modern art with a focus on the history of photography. Her research interests include photography in the illustrated press, relationships between art and politics in the interwar period, and the migration of artists from Eastern Europe to France and the United States. She is currently at work on her dissertation, “George Hoyningen-Huene and the Cultural Politics of Fashion Photography,” which situates Hoyningen-Huene (1900–1968) as one of many Eastern European émigrés who established careers in photography and design in Paris after World War I. This dissertation investigates how Hoyningen-Huene’s fashion photographs were not only tools for elite consumption of luxury goods, but also participated in the profound social and political transformations of interwar Europe and the United States. 

Whittaker holds a B.A. in art history from Macaulay Honors College at the City College of New York/CUNY, where her honors senior thesis examined Czech photographer Joseph Sudek’s relationship with the U.S. during the Cold War. Before coming to Princeton, she was a 2017–18 Fulbright Study/Research Grantee at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her doctoral research has been generously supported by Princeton’s Eugene Bradford *60 Graduate Fellowship, Princeton’s Donald and Mary Hyde Summer Fellowship for Research Abroad, and a Wallis Annenberg Research Grant at USC. She is currently a 2022–23 Houghton Library Visiting Fellow at Harvard.