About Me
I am a New York-based art historian specializing in American twentieth and twenty-first century sculpture, site-specific environments, and psychoanalytic theories of object relations. My research focuses on material object studies, specifically, the spatiality and phenomenology of sculptural objects—in intersection with cultural, psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, affect, and disability theories. I look at how aesthetic objects are made, sited, and exchanged as embodied encounters with observers across time and space as a way of generating affective narratives and meanings. I am particularly interested in how different kinds of objects participate in discursive practices of embodied knowledge, intimacy, reciprocity, domesticity, gender, and play.
My first book, Transformative Objects and the Aesthetics of Play: Louise Bourgeois’s Sculpture, 1947–2000, was published by Bloomsbury in April 2025. Research for the book conducted in the D. W. Winnicott Archive held at The Wellcome Collection in London was supported by a grant from the Association for Art History, UK in 2021.
I received my Ph.D. in art history and criticism from Stony Brook University in New York in 2001 where I was the twice-recipient of the Art Department’s Maurice and Miriam Goldberger Fellowship. I earned an M.A. in museum studies from the City College of New York and a bachelor’s degree in journalism and studio art from James Madison University in Virginia.
I currently research and write full-time; however, I have over twenty years of experience in teaching undergraduate art history in New York and New Jersey. Past appointments include Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History and Curator at the College at Old Westbury, New York (SUNY); Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art History at Stony Brook University (SUNY), Pratt Institute, New York University, Hunter College (CUNY), Seton Hall University, and Drew University. Courses I taught include History of Western Art: Early Renaissance to Postmodern, Early Twentieth-Century Art, History of Art Since 1945, Critical History of Art II (methodologies), Modern Art History (Nineteenth to Twentieth Century), Visual Culture Since Warhol, and History of Photography.
Since 2014, I have presented my research at art historical, psychoanalytic, and interdisciplinary academic conferences and symposia throughout the United States, UK, and Europe, including New York, Notre Dame, Savannah, Montreal, Paris, Vienna, and at numerous museums and universities, including the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study, University of London; Institute of Art History, University of Zürich; the National Gallery of Modern Art, Scotland, Edinburgh; Paris Sorbonne University; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams, MA; Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz and Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany.
Education
Ph.D. Art History and Criticism, 2001
Stony Brook University, State University of New York
Honors
Association for Art History, UK Research and Travel Grant, November 2021
Maurice and Miriam Goldberger Fellowship, Art Department, Stony Brook University, New York, 1996–97, 1997–98
PUBLICATIONS
Monographs
Transformative Objects and the Aesthetics of Play: Louise Bourgeois’s Sculpture, 1947–2000 (Bloomsbury 2025)
Objects and Other Things: Materiality and Imagination in Contemporary American Sculpture (in preparation)
Edited Volumes
“Attachment, Affect, and Loss: The Material Objects of Art History and Psychoanalysis,” chap. in Routledge Companion to Marxism in Art History, eds. Brian Winkenweder and Tijen Tunali (Routledge 2025)
“From Kernel to Shell: Louise Bourgeois’s Lairs,” chap. in The Cultural Construction of Hidden Spaces: Essays on Pockets, Pouches and Secret Drawers, eds. James Brown, Anna Jamieson, and Naomi Segal (Brill 2024)
“Aesthetics of Disability and the Hybrid Body in Louise Bourgeois’s Femme Maison,” chap. in Disability and Art History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century, eds. Elizabeth Howie and Ann Millett-Gallant (Routledge 2022)
“Louise Bourgeois’s Janus, (De-)Sublimation, and Empathy,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 19, Special Issue on Sublimation: Redefining Materiality in Art after Modernism/Sublimierung: Neubestimmungen von Materialität in der Kunst nach dem Modernismus, vol. 19, eds. Christian Berger and Annika Schlitte (Felix Meiner Verlag 2021)
“Louise Bourgeois’s Melancholy Objects to be Used,” chap. in Modernist Objects, eds. Noëlle Cuny and Xavier Kalck (Clemson University Press 2020)
“A Taste for Sham: Examples of Perversion and Suffering in Contemporary Art,” chap. in Dialectical Conversions: Donald Kuspit’s Art Criticism, eds. David Craven and Brian Winkenweder (Liverpool University Press 2011)
Contributed Essays
“Imperfectly ‘Remembered’: Louise Bourgeois’s Objects to be Used,” RoundTable, Special issue on Memory, Roehampton University and Fincham Press (November 2019, online)
“What I’m Reading: Lynn M. Somers,” Art Journal Open (February 2017, online)
“Fauvism,” “Neo-Impressionism,” and “Georges-Pierre Seurat,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, general ed. Stephen Ross (Routledge 2017, online)
Reviews
Book Review (1 February 2022): Philip Larratt-Smith and Juliet Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter (Yale University Press, 2020) in The Polyphony
https://thepolyphony.org/2022/02/01/louise-bourgeois-freuds-daughter-book-review/
Book Review (24 January 2022): Hugh Campbell, Space Framed: Photography, Architecture and the Social Landscape (Lund Humphries, 2000) in History of Photography, Taylor and Francis online
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PIGIW69PKDBPRKVHCGAA/full?target=10.1080/03087298.2021.2020477
CONFERENCES AND SYMPOSIA
April 9–11, 2025
Panel Convener: The Work of Sculpture: Object Encounters within Art History and Everyday Life. Association for Art History, UK, Annual Conference, University of York, UK
October 17–19, 2024
Panel Co-convener (with Emmy Waldman). Beyond Luxury, or, How to Use a Work of Art. ASAP/15: Not a Luxury, CUNY Graduate Center and Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY
June 15–18, 2022
“False Fronts and Dead Ends: Walker Evans’s Vernacular Modernism” (paper). Fourth International Conference of the French Society for Modernist Studies / Société d’études modernists, Université de Caen, Normandy, France
June 3–4, 2022
“The Object Relations of Prosthetic Life: Thinking and Feeling through Things” (paper). Unlearn the Body: New Approaches on Disability and Art History, Institute of Art History, University of Zürich, Switzerland
April 6–8, 2022
Panel Convener: Critical Perspectives on Disability in Art and Visual Culture. Association For Art History, UK, Annual Conference (online)
December 2–4, 2021
“From Kernel to Shell: Louise Bourgeois’s Lairs” (paper). Pockets, Pouches and Secret Drawers, Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study, University of London (online)
April 14–17, 2021
Panel Convener: Material/Immaterial: The Lives (and Afterlives) of Objects. “The Matter of Darkness: Rothko’s Late Works as Transformational Objects” (paper). Association For Art History, UK, Annual Conference (online)
November 1, 2019
“Reflections on Slow Empathy in American Sculpture Since the 1960s” (paper). Slow: A Symposium in Praxis & Theory. Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA)
October 3–5, 2019
“Sculpture as Liminal Object: Louise Bourgeois’s Janus” (paper). On the Threshold: Liminality in Theory and Art Historical Praxis. 20th Conference of the Austrian Art Historians Association (VöKK), Vienna
February 13–16, 2019
“Empathy in American Sculpture Since the 1960s” (paper). Panel: Other Phenomenologies in American Art, College Art Association 107th Annual Conference, New York, NY
October 17–20, 2018
“Louise Bourgeois’s Janus and Selfobject Transference” (paper). Vienna – Kohut – Self Psychology: Searching for Creativity in Times of Crisis. 41st International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology (IAPSP) Conference, co-sponsored by Vienna Circle for Psychoanalysis and Selfpsychology and Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy + Psychoanalysis, Vienna
June 13–16, 2018
“Louise Bourgeois’s Melancholy Objects to be Used” (paper). Modernist Objects, Third International Conference of the French Society for Modernist Studies / Société d’études modernistes, Paris Sorbonne University
December 14–16, 2017
“Louise Bourgeois’s Janus: A Case for Psychoanalytic Sublimation” (paper). Sublimation – Mind, Matter, Concept in Art after Modernism. Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz and Kunsthalle Mainz
June 2–4, 2016
“Walker Evans’s Subway Portraits: Concealing and Revealing Photographic Facts” (paper). Under Surveillance in the Space Between Literature and Culture, 1914–1945, 18th Annual Conference of the Space Between Society, McGill University, Montreal
June 19–21, 2015
“’Home is Where We Start From’: Nostalgia and Domesticity in the Early Work of Louise Bourgeois” (paper). At Home in the Space Between Literature and Culture, 1914–1945, 17th Annual Conference of the Space Between Society, University of Notre Dame
February 28–March 1, 2014
“Temporality, Trace, and Ambivalence in the Work of Sally Mann” (paper). Palimpsest: The Layered Object. Fifth Biennial Art History Symposium. Savannah College of Art and Design
February 7–8, 2014
“Psychoanalysis as Art and Cure: Louise Bourgeois from Beginning to End” (paper). Future Bourgeois: Symposium and Workshop, Organized by ARTIST ROOMS Research Partnership, The Fruitmarket Gallery and the National Gallery of Modern Art, Scotland, Edinburgh
TEACHING
Adjunct Assistant Professor (1997–2017), Stony Brook University; College at Old Westbury (SUNY); Pratt Institute, Brooklyn; New York University; Hunter College (CUNY); Drew University, Madison, NJ; Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ