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.

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 that might seem quite distant from the print medium, but are, in fact, shown to be guided by its operations. 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.