Biography
Assistant Instructional Professor, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, Department of Art History, The College
I study art, architecture, and decoration of the long nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the lived experience of works of art and design. In so doing, I frequently pursue art’s entanglements with literature, the built environment, social theory, and theories of art itself. My teaching and research focus on spaces of domestic, private life and what they can tell us about shifts in social experience as well as the challenges and consequences of its representation under conditions of global modernity. Currently, these interests gather around two larger projects. The first, a book manuscript with the working title Wallpaper and Window: The Interior and Social Belonging in Fin-de-Siècle Art and Architecture, is a migratory study of the domestic interior as a site of artistic experimentation and index of modern experience across late-nineteenth century Europe. The second is a nascent “biography” of home art collections in and around Detroit. This curatorial and public-facing project explores the livability of an earlier moment of European modernism amidst the sharp rise and transformation of the industrial Midwest after World War II. My writing has appeared in West 86th, Design and Culture, Panorama, as well as in edited volumes in France and North America.
In addition to MAPH curriculum, I teach thematic courses in the Art History Department on topics such as luxury and historical change, interiority and modernity, color and décor, and migratory aesthetics. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of History of Art at the University of Michigan and my BA from the University of British Columbia. I’m also a graduate of MAPH, which I completed in 2009. I am a member of Faculty Forward/SEIU Local 73, the contingent faculty union at the University of Chicago.
Upcoming Courses:
Migratory Aesthetics (Spring ‘25)
What could it meant to construct a migratory history of modern art and design? The nineteenth century was often characterized by bounded models of settlement, citizenship, subjectivity, and what it might look like to intimately belong in such a world. Yet the character of that belonging was entangled with experiences of mass migration, mobility, displacement, exile, and untiring attempts to imagine a world otherwise.
In this seminar, we will recenter migration as a material reality and interpretive tool. Through a series of case studies grounded in Europe and its wider worlds, students will investigate moments in which people, objects, and ideas formed as a result of the utterly mobile nature of nineteenth-century life and expressive thought. We will turn our attention to a wave of recent art historical scholarship on the topic, and to literary and critical writings of the period, alongside paintings, prints, sculpture, design, and built environments (many from local collections). In short, frequent, writing assignments, students will be prompted to reflect on broader applications of a migratory method for reading familiar objects and histories anew.
Past Courses:
Interiority, Modernity, Domesticity, Decoration
The domestic interior emerged in step with modernity itself. “Interiorization,” Walter Benjamin famously claimed, was a defining characteristic of nineteenth-century culture, and the interior came to be understood as the physical space of the home as well as an image of mental life. While often figured as refuge from modernity’s more spectacular developments, in this seminar we will establish the interior as a complex historical construct, a tool, with which to read the shifting texture of the world outside its walls. At the same time, we will examine how artists, writers, and designers employed the interior and interiority as a platform upon which to experiment with new tactics of representation, often borrowing from one another’s toolbox, in attempts to represent that world and imagine it anew.
This course will progress thematically and across disciplines, mobilizing key concepts to pursue the interior’s entanglements with a cross-section of modernity’s aesthetic, social, and cultural challenges. Through case studies, we will consider the following: psychological interiority, representation, and the public value of private experience; space, text, and image; subjectivity, the senses, and the built environment; craft, luxury, and globalization; modernism, gender, domesticity. Our objects of study will include paintings, decorative schemes, prints, décor samples, and architectural media alongside literary and critical writings. Students will be expected to complete frequent small writing assignments, bringing their own backgrounds and interests to bear on course themes and advancing our collective understanding of the topic. By extension, participants need not be specialists in Art History, but should be invested in working together to activate the possibilities for an overlooked interface between intimate, “feminine,” or private aesthetic experience and broad historical change.
Luxury and Crisis
What role have those objects considered to be superfluous, lavish, fashionable, and personal played in sculpting our collective social, political, and economic worlds? Furnishings, tapestries, silverware, porcelain, fashion, and jewelry have long been understood as superficial indulgences of the elite, existing outside the space and time of historical change. Yet these items have of course permeated all classes of society and processes of production, promotion, consumption, disparity, power, exploitation, and resistance.
Some Marxist historians have understood crisis as integral to capitalist modernity and its rupture, while theorists of art and architectural modernism have somewhat paradoxically imagined luxury objects as instrumental in building socially equitable futures. In this seminar, we will investigate moments in which luxury and crisis, these seemingly opposing terms, were galvanized by makers, wearers, collectors, and the objects in their possession. Our objects of study will include silverware from the trans-Atlantic slave trade; a political manifesto of “communal luxury;” furniture crafted by a formerly-enslaved cabinetmaker in North Carolina; and modernist residential architecture in Chicago, among others. Students will be prompted to reflect on the persistence of our themes to our current global crises, where divisions between “essential” and “non-essential” work and goods have exposed long held hierarchies of power and access, perhaps making way for new possible futures. Approved for credit toward the MAPH Curatorial Option.