Personal Biography
I am a historian of art and architecture in the modern period, with special interests in political philosophy, historiography, aesthetic theory, and visual rhetoric. Transnational in orientation, my work straddles disciplinary divides between material culture studies, art, and architecture. I hold a PhD from the University of Chicago, where my dissertation on the architect Yona Friedman and political imagination in postwar planning won the Feitler Prize for the Best Dissertation in Art History. During my doctoral studies, I spent a year as a Fellow at the IIAS, where I studied the history of mass housing and technologies of emergency shelter. My doctoral research was supported by a CLIR Mellon Dissertation Fellowship and I have been awarded the Graham Foundation’s Carter Manny Award for Research and the Schiff Award for Architectural Writing. Before joining Corpus in 2023 as the James Legge Memorial Junior Research Fellow in Comparative Aesthetics and Art History, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max-Planck-Institut.
Research
My current research project examines a popular 19th-century form of visual book that gathered “samples” of ornament from artifacts and buildings drawn from across the global past and arrayed them, comparatively, as specimens of study and inspiration for European designers and as studio tools for craftspeople. Such historicist pattern-books are a form of visual knowledge transmission so ubiquitous in artists’ studios, living room tables, tattoo parlors, and academic libraries, that they remain significantly under-theorized. This research is a collaboration with the historian of Islamic art Meekyung MacMurdie. Together, we are studying pattern-books as indexes of colonial violence, records of the global movement of objects, and influential theorizations of the mechanics of stylistic change that deeply shaped the discipline of art history in early decades of its institutional formation. At Oxford, I am specifically working on the engagement of German-language formalist aesthetic theory with the idea of pattern as a hermeneutic and heuristic, and investigating how the politically fraught attempts of early formalist scholars to theorize race and collective identity, and their attempts transcultural seeing, used pattern-books as primary sources.
In parallel to my research on pattern, I am studying the role played by movable, ephemeral, and often prefabricated architecture in the destructive processes of mass displacement and colonial settlement. In collaboration with Adrian Anagnost, a historian of art in the modern Americas, I am editing a volume of essays on the topic. Lastly, I am adapting my dissertation on the architect Yona Friedman into a book.
Publications
w/ Jaś Elsner, “Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State (1948),” in Empires of Faith: Histories of Image and Religion in Late Antiquity, from India to Ireland, edited by Jaś Elsner (London: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 293-319.
w/ Rotem Linial, “Strange Stones and Good Neighbors,” in And a River Went Out of Eden, edited by Maayan Elyakim (Jerusalem: Shocken Library Press, 2018), 39-48 [Hebrew].
“Yona Friedman, Architecture mobile = Architecture vivante,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 75:3 (2017), 121-123.
“Seeing Through a Roman Lens: Formalism, Photography, and the Lost Visual Rhetoric of Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry,” History of Photography 40:3 (2016), 301-329.