I am an art historian whose research centers on the art, architecture, and material culture of the transatlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they relate to histories of environment and race.
As the Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, I am working on a book manuscript, “Surface Experiments: Art, Nature, and the Making of Early America,” which recovers the artistic, scientific, and philosophical fascination with surfaces as sites of physical transformation in the eighteenth-century transatlantic world. In this project, I explore a range of experimental surface techniques, including mezzotint engraving, paper marbling, veneer furniture, and oil painting. A second project mines printed portraits to show how, over the long eighteenth century, printmaking’s strategies of representation evolved to materialize modern racialized subjects.
My scholarly work has been supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and the American Council for Learned Societies, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the American Antiquarian Society, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Winterthur Museum and Library, and the Yale Center for British Art.
In addition to a Ph.D. from Harvard University, I hold a master’s of science in architectural history from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s of architecture from Cornell University. Prior to beginning my graduate studies, I taught architectural design and worked at the Boston firm, Höweler + Yoon Architecture.
Publications
“Engraving's ‘Immoveable Veil of Black’: Phillis Wheatley's Portrait and the Politics of Technique.” The Art Bulletin (June 2022).“Surfaces, Surfacing: Flatness as Physical Fact in Alex Katz's Work.” Alex Katz: Gathering, ed. Katherine Brinson. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2022.
“Contact, and Contact Again: Reflections on an Eighteenth-Century Powder Horn” (Co-authored with Kailani Polzak). Invited contribution to roundtable, “When and Where Does Colonial America End?” Panorama (Fall 2021).
“The Nature of Early American Veneer Furniture.” Journal18 Issue 9, Field Notes (Spring 2020).
“‘A Gloss Equal to Glass’: The Material Brilliance of Early American Furniture.” In In Sparkling Company: Reflections on Glass in the 18th-Century British World, edited by Christopher Maxwell. Corning, NY: Corning Museum of Glass, 2020.
Selected Presentations
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Associations of Historians of American Art (AHAA) Biennial Symposium, “Neoclassical Veneer: A Study in Transatlantic Material Culture” (October 2022)Cambridge University, The Materials of Modernity, “Superficial Superficiality: Veneer’s Contradictions in the British Transatlantic World” (July 2022)
Clark Art Institute, Imprinting Race, “Materializing Skin in Eighteenth-Century Mezzotint” (March 2022)
Université de Paris, About Time: Temporality in American Art and Visual Culture, “The Unfaithful Surface: John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 (November 2021)
The Huntington, Paper Ecologies in the Early Modern World, "Overmarbling and Paper’s Disorderly Metamorphoses," (November 2020, online)
CAA Annual Conference, "Composing Type, Throwing Pigments: The Revolutionary Potential of Marbling in Early America” (February 2020)