William Ma
Assistant Professor
Graduate Coordinator
225-578-9043 | 205 Julian T. White Hall
williamma1@lsu.edu
PhD University of California at Berkeley
William Ma is a Chinese art historian who specializes in the artistic exchanges between China and the world in the late-imperial and modern periods. His research interest includes material culture, workshop practices, aesthetic pedagogy, Jesuit missionary art, and the relationship between export art and the imperial court during the High Qing.
Ma received two BA degrees (integrative biology and history of art, 2006) and a PhD (history of art, 2016) from the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to teaching at his alma mater, he has taught courses in Asian art history at the University of San Francisco and Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. A former Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, Ma has also worked at the Las Vegas Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum, and the University of California Museum of Paleontology.
He is currently conducting field and archival research on the intersection between surface, space, and material culture of the Nguyen dynasty in collaboration with an international team (France, Vietnam, USA) of interdisciplinary scholars (a colonial art historian, a contemporary art curator, an architect, and a landscape architect) in Hue, Vietnam. This is part of the Site and Space in Southeast Asia, funded primarily through the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative.