As an art historian trained in visual histories of North America, my research focuses on how objects reveal and distort histories of material extraction, transcultural circulation, and broader ecologies throughout the Intermountain West.
My current scholarship focuses on histories of silver, a material that long operated as the aesthetic medium of empire-building throughout the Americas. My book, The American Silverscape: Art, Extraction, and Sovereignty, reconsiders the fraught tension between the politics of US empire and the realities of extraction in the late-nineteenth century through examination of silver objects: silver world’s fair sculptures, Indian Peace medals, a Comstock dining service, and coin-based Diné (Navajo) jewelry. While many of these artworks were designed to communicate ideas of power and control over natural resources throughout the American West, their aesthetic qualities of reflectivity and mutability often undercut Euro-American claims. Situated amidst this tension is my notion of the “silverscape,” which I use to frame silver’s ecologies and to center histories of environment, Indigenous sovereignty, and mobility through objects and spaces often overlooked in the field. This project engages in current scholarly debates that critique and expand definitions of landscape that have dominated the field of US art history since its conception.
Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History with the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California, and am affiliated with the Institute on California and the West. I hold a Ph.D. in the History of Art & Architecture from Harvard University, as well as an MA from Tufts University, and a BS in mathematics from the Catholic University of America. My research has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Art at the National Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Huntington Library, the Center for Craft, the Decorative Arts Trust, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies.
I live in Santa Monica, CA.