Teaching

Hunter College (Assistant Professor)

Issues in 19th-Century French Painting

Undergraduate Lecture

This course offers a survey of French painting in the second half of the 19th century. Each week will focus on a specific movement, among them Realism, Impressionism, Pointillism, Symbolism, and other core schools or painting traditions like the Barbizon school and Orientalism. In addition to offering a chronology about the change in art from the rigid Academy system of the 18th century to more experimental movements, we will also address questions of gender and sexuality, the Anthropocene, and global trade.

Modern Art I

Graduate Lecture

This course offers a survey of modern art from 1850 to 1900, examining key aesthetic traditions that spanned the Atlantic, showing continuities of technique, iconography, and style across Europe, the Americas, and the territories subjected to their colonial expansion. Each lecture will tackle key questions related to the art and politics of the era, including labor, the emergence of queer subcultures, environmental management, and the fight to abolish slavery. The course is deeply invested in understanding art through various media, studying canonical artists alongside other elements of visual culture with which they interacted, including panoramas, dioramas, popular prints, posters, photography, and film.

Research Methods of Art History: Multimedia Surrealism

Undergraduate Writing Seminar

Surrealism helped expand what art can be: from complex symbolic paintings to found objects, scribbles, and even films of waves on a shore. In this course, we will develop tools to speak about art across different media: painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, exhibition design, periodicals, and film. We will also discuss what types of evidence art historians draw on to analyze these works, including artist’s writings, newspaper coverage, and close visual analysis. Each week tackles two interrelated questions: How do art historians write about a particular medium? And how did surrealism express itself in that medium?

Twentieth-Century Art I

Undergraduate Lecture

This course surveys key movements in modern art, beginning in Europe with German Expressionism, Italian Futurism, and Soviet photography, and then following these developments across borders to consider muralism in Mexico and the United States, surrealism as a global phenomenon, and the international turn toward abstraction. The course is organized thematically in three parts: first examining different visual languages developed by modernists, then turning to how artists refigured bodies in their art for political ends, and finally exploring how abstraction emerged across both art and design.

Exhibiting the World

Graduate Seminar

This seminar takes a capacious approach to exhibition history: asking not only how museums have managed art and other cultural artifacts, but also how ferns, dolphins, and even meteorites have been exhibited across a range of institutions. The course is organized into four sections according to the material on display: minerals, animals/plants, human cultures, and art. Through case studies including royal menageries in Europe, aquariums in Egypt, and local institutions around New York City, we will consider site-specific histories while acknowledging wider patterns in collecting from 1800 to today. Throughout, we will also think across different periods, attending to how contemporary artists continue to critique institutions and rethink the white cube, whether by staging gardens or by creating performances, often in response to imperial histories of collecting and knowledge production.

Columbia University (Instructor of Record)

Ecology, Art, and Empire

Instructor of Record, Fall 2023 (Columbia University), upper undergraduate seminar (Art History, cross-listed with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender)

Looking at a range of visual material from 18th-century maps to contemporary installation art, this course develops a mode of reading visual material “ecologically.” Drawing on feminist and queer methodologies, the course traces how diverse ideologies of race, capitalism, and imperialism shaped constructions of nature in colonial and postcolonial encounters between Europe and Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Download the syllabus here.

Art Humanities:
Masterpieces of Western Art

Instructor of Record, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Summer 2022, Spring 2024 (Columbia University)

A survey of Western Art through 11 units from the Parthenon to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Art Humanities is a mandatory course for all Columbia undergraduates. My version of the course adds further units about cave art, early cinema, surrealism, ecological art, and contemporary artists who incorporate art history into their practice. Through this course, students are trained in essential visual analysis skills and engage larger themes about globalism, racial/gender identity, and power.

Download the syllabus here.