Education

PhD 1997 University of California, Los Angeles
MA 1989 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
BA 1988 Occidental College, Los Angeles

Selected Publications

Crime and Class in Print: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (Syracuse University Press, 2026)

A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022).

Humbug! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City's Penny Press, New York: Fordham University Press, 2020.

The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898: Art, Anthropology and Popular Culture, editor, University of Nebraska Press, 2018.

"Life-like Delineations of Real Life: Illustrating Wilfred Montressor, Or, The Secret Order of the Seven, a New York City Mystery of 1846," Anglia, 143:1 (April 2025) 101-135.

Co-editor, with Lauren van Haaften-Schick, “Beyond Copyright: Law and Art,” Panorama: The Journal of the Historians of American Art; introduction and set of five essays, June 2023.

Lost Writers of the Plains, editor, NET Foundation, iBook, 2015. 

Regionalism and the Humanities, ed. with Timothy Mahoney, University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

Regionalism and Reform: Art & Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2002; paperback 2015.

“Introduction,” Thomas Kinkade (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2000) 9-34.

“Women and Art in the Passing Show,” in The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898: Art, Anthropology and Popular Culture, ed. Wendy Jean Katz (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) 105-160.

“Walt Whitman and “American” Art,” in Essays on the Study of English Language and Literature, ed. Huang Zongying (Changchun City, China: Jilin Publishing Group, 2011) 31-48.

“To bring forth good fruit: still-life painting and nationalism,” Poetical Fire, ed. Brandon Ruud. Sheldon Museum of Art, 2011; 10-19.

“Undocumented Art Criticism by Whitman in the New York Sunday Dispatch and New York Evening Post,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 32:4 (Spring 2015) 215-229.

“Robert S. Duncanson, Race, and Auguste Comte’s Positivism in Cincinnati,” American Studies, 53:1  (2014) 5-30.

“Early American Portraits:  Private to Public, Colonial to Republic,” Gilcrease Museum Journal, XVI: 2 (2008) 40-64.

“Fancy Painting, Street Children and the Fast Men of the Pavé,” Nineteenth-Century Studies, 21 (2007) 85-126.

“Portraits and the Production of the Civil Self in Seventeenth-Century Boston,” Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture, 39: 2/3 (2005) 101-128.

"The Art of Pleasing: Lilly Martin Spencer and Refinement,"American Studies. 42:1 (Spring 2001) 5-37.

"Robert S. Duncanson: City and Hinterland," Prospects, vol. 25 (October 2000) 311-335. 

"A Great Moral Discourse: Rembrandt Peale's The Court of Death,"Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, 70:1/2 (1996) 14-25.

Honors and Awards

• Reynolda House Museum of American Art Mellon Fellowship, 2019-2020.
• Smithsonian Institution Senior Fellowship at the National Museum of American Art, 2014.
• Jay T. Last Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, 2008.
• Andrew Oliver Short-Term Research Fellowship, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, 2004.

Courses

102: Introduction to Art History and Criticism: Renaissance to the present

251: American Art to 1865

252: American Art 1865-1945

391: American Society and Culture in the Civil War Era

398: Recovering the Lost; Narrative

451/851: Nineteenth-Century American Art

452/852: American Art 1893-1939

498/898: Special Topics (Winslow Homer/Thomas Eakins; Rethinking Regionalism: Art, Landscape and Culture of the West; Great Plains Art Exhibition: Sex & Gender in the Art of the Plains)

901: Methodology and Historiography of Art History

919: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Nineteenth Century

951: Seminar in American Art