Director of the New England Arts and Architecture Program; Senior Lecturer in Art
Expert in New England art and architecture. Co-directs the architecture program.
My research focuses on the visual and material culture of New England from the earliest period of European contact to the 20th century. I am fascinated by the stories objects can tell about people and places; about events and memories; about past lives and experiences. From grand civic buildings to ordinary dwellings and from paintings by John Singleton Copley to the work of amateur filmmakers, I have explored a wide range of aesthetic expressions to uncover compelling, intriguing, and often infuriating or heartbreaking stories. There are captivating tales out there, but even more interesting, from my point of view, is the question of how these objects communicate meaning. How do courthouses tell the story of legal professionalization? How do home movies communicate attachment to place? And how can a landscape image convey an artist's attempt to understand bewildering change?
In the Art Department at Wellesley College I am director of the New England Arts and Architecture Program (a curricular and extra-curricular program focused on exploring New England's cultural expressions) and co-director of the Architecture major. I primarily teach intermediate and advanced courses in American art and architectural history. My upper-level seminars include ARTH 317:Historic Preservation: Theory and Practice;ARTH 318:New England Arts & Architecture, and ARTH 320:Boston Architecture and Urban Planning. My courses at the 200-level include ARTH 206:American Art, Architecture & Design; ARTH 231:北美建筑; ARTH 245:House and Home: Domestic Architecture, Interiors & Material Life in North America, and ARTH 266:New Perspectives on the Global City（与Alice Friedman教授联合教授）。
I am currently working on two scholarly projects. The first, a book manuscript tentatively titledTovookan's Story: Pictorial Autobiography and Abolitionist Narrative in Antebellum America, examines the life and work of folk artist Pedro Tovookan Parris and his experience of slavery and freedom in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. The second is another book-length study,New England’s Prospects: Landscape Representation in Word and Image, 1750-1850,that explores the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New England landscape through its narrative, pictorial, and cartographic representations.
My previous publications includeAmateur Movie Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915-1960, co-edited with Karan Sheldon (Indiana University Press, 2017) which won the 2018 prize for “Best Edited Collection” from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies;从小酒馆到法院：美国法律的建筑和仪式，1658-1860(Johns Hopkins, 2004), andNew Views of New England: Studies in Material and Visual Culture, 1680-1830co-edited with Georgia Barnhill (University of Virginia Press, 2012). I am the author of a number of essays in peer-reviewed journals and the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the Getty Foundation, the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, and the Luce Foundation.
我也积极参与公共历史和历史保存的领域，特别是作为非营利组织的董事主席，被控解释和保留波士顿老州房子，这是北美最古老的思想和关键辩论的遗址和导致美国革命的冲突。作为主席，我与组织的高级工作人员密切合作，以改变访客的建筑经验。通过扩大财务能力，与波士顿的不同社区联系，发展创新计划，我们从根本上重新配置了这一重要的自由踪迹作为一个令人兴奋的，包容性和重要的文化组织，邀请人们探索美国代表民主的历史和实践。