I am currently a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. My research asks how modern art shapes identity. Informed by my interest in critical theory, I treat identity as an ongoing process, not a fixed position, exploring how we come to identify as the people who we are in relation to others and social institutions.
My first book, Painting with Monet (Princeton University Press), investigates how modern paradigms of artistic selfhood struggle to reconcile an ideal of singular individuality with the reality of social interdependence.
My next project moves from relations among artists to their relations with the environment, asking how the impressionists understood their humanness vis-Ă -vis naturalness, analogizing social and artistic transformations of the natural world.
In my work on twentieth- and twenty-first century art, I trace how artists from marginalized social identities (racial, gendered, etc.) challenged modernist concepts of universality from within, developing novel strategies for integrating political and formal commitments.
Throughout, I maintain a focus on the mystery of representation. What does it mean for one thing to represent another one? I approach this problem both theoretically and historically, focusing especially on moments in European and American art history when it seemed especially difficult. As such, I am drawn to basic analytical categories such as comparison and resemblance, as well as methodological issues concerning how conventions of represententation relate to the socio-historical structures in which they develop.
Em