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Bio

I am passionate about the ways art history can inform us to make a better, more just and equitable world.  This interest drives both my research agenda and the content of my classes.  I’m particularly interested in international perspectives on American history and culture, which is why I actively present at conferences around the globe, in locations including Seoul, Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, and Pretoria, as well as many European cities.

Areas of Interest

• Visual culture of antebellum American slavery
• Paint-by-numbers art in the 20^th century
• The history of art collecting
• American landscape painting history
• Thomas Kinkade: situating Kinkade in the context of American art history, particularly landscape painting; within art historical discourse about art, aesthetics, religion and the boundaries of art; within American history in the ‘culture wars’ and Satanic Panic era, and as an evangelical Christian.

Selected Publications

• Gilbert Hunt, the City Blacksmith: slavery, freedom, and fame in antebellum Richmond, Virginia. Chapter 12 in  ed. Lawrence Aje and Catherine Armstrong (Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2019) 
• “’Born in America, in Europe Bred, in Africa Travell’d, and in Asia Wed: Elihu Yale, material culture and actor networks in the 17th through 21st century” (28:3) November, 2016, p. 320-343
• “Jean Hélion, La Fille au Reflect de l’Homme (Portrait of Pegeen Guggenheim),” with Connie Cutler, in (Ashgate, 2016) 

Selected Presentations

• “The Fall of the Wild? Taming Nature in American Landscape Paintings” Indiana Humanities  2021-2023
  • Presentations: Fremont Public Library, Tipton County Public Library
• Closing Lecture for “The Engraved Works of Winslow Homer,” Fort Wayne Museum of Art, September 20, 2018 
• “God in the American Landscape” May 2016. Invited lecture at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China