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 Institute for Advance Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where I studied the history of mass housing and technologies of emergency shelter. My work has been supported by a CLIR Mellon Dissertation Fellowship and I have been awarded the Graham Foundation’s Carter Manny Award 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. Such historicist pattern-books are a form of visual knowledge transmission so ubiquitous—staples of artists’ studios, living room tables, tattoo parlors, and academic libraries—that they remain significantly under-theorized. In collaboration with the historian of Islamic art Meekyung MacMurdie, I am studying these culturally comparative pattern-books as a prehistory of contemporary attempts to write global art history. We are examining them as indexes of colonial violence, records of the global movement of objects and images, and as influential theorizations of the mechanics of stylistic change that deeply shaped the discipline of art history in the early decades of its institutional formation. At Oxford, I am specifically working on the engagement of German-language formalist aesthetics with the idea of pattern as a hermeneutic and heuristic and I am investigating how the politically fraught attempts of early formalist scholars to theorize race and collective identity—and to see transculturaly—used pattern-books as primary sources.
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.