I am an assistant professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Trained in visual and material histories of North America, I analyze how objects reveal and distort histories of extraction, transcultural circulation, and 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 current book project, The American Silverscape: Art, Land, and Extraction, 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.
I hold a Ph.D. in the History of Art & Architecture from Harvard University and an MA from Tufts University. My research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Southern California, 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 Goleta, CA.
