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I am a scholar of American art of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, with particular interests in the print medium, material culture studies, and the circulation of ideas across media. Across my work, I examine how material forms and contexts that art history has traditionally treated as secondary are, in fact, central to the production and interpretation of canonical art of the United States. By foregrounding the dynamic exchange between understudied objects and comparatively well-known paintings and sculptures, my work contributes to ongoing disciplinary efforts to rethink the hierarchies of value and evidence that shape art historical narratives and, ultimately, to recover fuller histories of making and viewing. 

My first book, Tactile Sensibilities: Seeing Through Print in American Art (University of Chicago Press, Spring 2027), treats an unconsidered category of prints to uncover the prevalence of a tactile sensibility, or a culturally trained idea about touch’s role in perception, in American art of the long nineteenth century. Doing so allows a re-reading of canonical paintings and sculptures by arrtists including Raphaelle Peale, Hiram Powers, William Sidney Mount, and Winslow Homer that might seem quite distant from the print medium, but are, in fact, shown to be guided by its operations. 

My second book project in progress examines the second half of Jacob Lawrence’s career, during which he lived and worked in Seattle, Washington. It argues that spatial and temporal distance from the New York art world in which he first rose to prominence offered Lawrence a generative new vantage on the arc of his career, prompting a sophisticated reconsideration of his artistic philosophy. 

I received my PhD in the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018, and I was a faculty fellow at Colby College before joining the UW faculty in September 2020. My research has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS); the Wyeth Foundation; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens; the American Antiquarian Society; and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. I am also a senior fellow and founding member of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. At the UW, I offer undergraduate and graduate courses on American art to circa 1950.