About

I am an art historian specializing in the 20th and 21st centuries, with emphasis on the period from 1945 to the present. Previously, I worked in the curatorial departments of art museums in Philadelphia and Detroit and in leadership for nfp organizations.

My current research explores how Americans engaged with a foreign art form in projects that intersected international agendas with domestic everyday life, and linked the United States and Vietnam on questions of diplomacy, domestication and belonging in the Free World during the 1950s. I use historical texts and contemporary theory to illuminate archival materials, object practices, and discursive meanings that arise at the intersection of politics, economy and art.

Course topics I teach in relation to my research examine craft and decorative art in historiographies of modernism; visual culture, refugees and migrants; art and suffering; objects of diplomacy; heritage and memory; and the politics of exhibitions.