Graduate Student Profile

Aida Golchin is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University, and she will serve as the Co-President of the Art History Graduate Student Organization for the 2025–2026 academic year.
Her research focuses on the history of photography, with particular attention to nineteenth-century Qajar Iran. She is especially interested in the relationship between photography and the broader traditions of Persian visual culture, exploring their shared aesthetic characteristics, recurring subjects, and the ways in which they engage in dialogue with one another. Her broader research interests include Diplomatic Exchanges of Photo Albums in Nineteenth-Century Iran, photography in the Ottoman Empire, Islamic painting from the early modern to the modern period, the visual culture of modernity in the Middle East, and contemporary photography.
She holds a master’s degree in photography from the University of Tehran, Fine Arts Department, where she completed her thesis titled “Western Countries Through the Eyes of Iranian Photographers Since the Islamic Revolution.” In addition to her academic research, she also practices photography and has participated in several photo exhibitions in Iran.