Degrees

Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2015)
M.A., Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2008)
B.A., Vassar College (2004)

Teaching Interests

At Amherst, I teach the history of contemporary art from a transnational perspective. In my courses, we ask: How does the work of art operate in the world and how does the world operate in the work of art? This line of inquiry helps us think about the relationship between “the contemporary” and art history as well as about the relationship of art to history more generally. Among other topics, students will explore the politics of aesthetics, art's relationship to technological change, the history of exhibitions, the art market, the materiality of recent practices, and the interactions between art and the process known as globalization. My course “Latin American Art: Strategies and Tactics” will also count towards the major in Latinx and Latin American Studies (LLAS).

Seeing works of art in person contributes a great deal to the study of art’s history; so far, field trips have taken us to the Carpenter Center, Harvard Art Museum, MASS MoCA, Dia: Beacon, the ICA Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, among other places.

Research Interests

In my scholarship, I analyze the ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first-century art has been entangled with political and economic processes, especially those relating to the spread of capitalism. Crucial to this research is an investigation of how this entanglement may be seen to manifest in the formal and material components of specific works of art. My first book, Hemispheric Integration: Materiality, Mobility, and the Making of Latin American Art, was published with University of California Press in 2020. It explores art, trade, and the trade in art from Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s. In a new and developing research project, I analyze art and architecture made since the 1990s in their relationship to changing notions of labor in the Internet age.  

I have published articles and essays on a range of topics and I have presented my research internationally at venues including the Institut National d’Histoire de l'art (Paris), the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Courtauld Institute of Art (London). Before arriving at Amherst, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute and a recipient of a Mellon Foundation-funded International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council.