My research sets objects at the center of the circulation of ideas in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. I am interested in art as a form of thought distinct from, but complementary to, textual traditions, and my work finds its home in the friction that arises between mediums, geographies, and languages. Driving my inquiries is the desire to understand how and why certain visual and material forms give shape to concepts, impulses, or anxieties not easily articulated in another. With an eye to unlikely resonance and unexpected constellation, my research reveals dialogues that emerged across the fields of fine and decorative arts, literature, and philosophy.

Peer-Reviewed Articles

“ ‘About the Tangle of the Rose’: Thinking with the Fin-de-Siècle Tendril” Art History 46:3 (2023): 512-538. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12734.

Books-in-Progress

Perverse Modernism: 1884-1900 asks how we might write an intellectual history of objects. A wide-ranging cultural history of trans-European art and thought from the 1884 “Scramble for Africa” to the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, it makes a novel methodological intervention into debates about art and politics, offers a transnational and interdisciplinary account of the origins of modernism, and sets capitalism at the root of the tale. At its center is a form often taken for granted in the history of art, but one which was as geographically and intermedially promiscuous as it was ideologically fraught: the motif.