Click here to book an office hours appointment

I am a scholar of American art, with research and teaching interests that concentrate in three intersecting thematic areas: the art and material culture of North America from colonial settlement to the mid-twentieth century; the theories and objects of media studies; and the construction of categories of race, ethnicity, and difference in visual culture. In my work, I am invested in recovering a fuller picture of how historic audiences — not merely the sliver of society that created and encountered fine art but a wider and more diverse population — perceived and made sense of the world around them.

I am completing a book entitled Tactile Encounters in American Art that offers a new account of ways of seeing in the United States. It charts a history of how, and to what ends, vision and touch cooperated during the transformative period between 1776–1910. At its center is a print culture genre of movable, physically interactive paper constructions that I term tactile images and that were, I argue, critical sites through which the purposes and politics of touch were negotiated. Other projects in progress engage with topics ranging from Jacob Lawrence's late career to the entangled histories of landscape, race, and nationalist identity in the Reconstruction-era American South.  

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 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.