Biography
Assistant Instructional Professor, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, Department of Art History, The College
My teaching and research stretch across several areas including nineteenth-century art and realist aesthetics, modern design and decoration, literature and art writing, and art theory. I’m broadly interested in what spaces of domestic life can tell us about shifts in private experience and the challenges of its representation under conditions of global modernity. One current project, a book manuscript with the working title Wallpaper and Window: The Interior and Social Belonging in Fin-de-Siècle Art and Architecture, is a study of the domestic interior as a site of artistic experimentation and index of modern experience in late-nineteenth century Europe. Additionally, I am at work on a nascent “biography” of home art collections in and around Detroit after World War II. This curatorial and publication project explores the livability of earlier European modernism amidst the sharp rise and transformation of the industrial Midwest.
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 the global Arts and Crafts. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2018. I’m also a graduate of MAPH, which I completed in 2009. I have worked in education departments at MCA Chicago and The Power Plant Contemporary in Toronto, and have contributed curatorial and scholarly work to collections in both France and North America. I love to talk about really great writing, take extraordinarily long city walks, listen to Canadian talk radio, and frequent my local branch of the Chicago Public Library. I am a member of Faculty Forward/SEIU Local 73, the contingent faculty union at the University of Chicago.