Profile

Sasha Whittaker is a Ph.D. candidate in modern art with a specialization in the history of photography. Her current research focuses on George Hoyningen-Huene (1900–1968), a leading fashion photographer who devised some of the genre’s most enduring pictorial strategies. Her dissertation, “Sun, Sand, and Stone: George Hoyningen-Huene’s Fashion Photography in the Mediterranean,” reveals how the Mediterranean—both as concept and as physical place—catalyzed Hoyningen-Huene’s innovations in photographing modern fashion and constructing an idealized human figure. This project bridges classical reception studies and the environmental humanities by analyzing, among other topics, Hoyningen-Huene’s introduction of ancient Greek sculpture into fashion shoots and his photographs of modern swimwear on artificial beaches. Sasha’s other research interests include the blue humanities, queer ecologies, migration studies, and Eastern European art. 

Her doctoral research has been supported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship, the Beatrice, Benjamin, and Richard Bader Fellowship in the Visual Arts of the Theatre at Harvard’s Houghton Library, and the Wallis Annenberg Research Grant at USC. At Princeton, her graduate studies and research have been supported by the Dean’s Completion Fellowship, the Center for Digital Humanities Graduate Fellowship, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Donald and Mary Hyde Summer Fellowship for Research Abroad, and the Eugene Bradford *60 Graduate Fellowship.

Sasha holds a B.A. in art history from Macaulay Honors College at the City College of New York/CUNY. Before coming to Princeton, she was a Fulbright Study/Research Grantee at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, where she researched botanical photography.