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, particularly as they relate to histories of environment and race. As 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 certain instances of 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.