History of Art, PhD
16th and 17th-century Dutch and Flemish Art; 17th-century Italian Art; Early Modern Prints and Drawings
I am currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC) where I teach art history and film courses.
I completed my graduate work in the History of Art department at The Ohio State University, specializing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art. I am especially interested in issues of visuality and much of my work centers on how artists explore the complex possibilities of painting as a medium which, while unquestionably part of the visible world, often shows us that which lies beyond the boundaries of corporeal vision. In this vein, I have worked on a number of projects that investigate the role of both corporeal and spiritual vision in image-making, including projects that explore issues of mirroring and Alberti’s claim that Narcissus was the inventor of painting; images of Visus, the personification of vision; paintings of St. Luke, the patron saint of painters; and the paragone of painting and sculpture.
My dissertation on Maarten de Vos (1532-1603), entitled “Envisioning the Threshold: Pictorial Disjunction in Maarten de Vos,” focuses on the importance of pictorially disjunctive elements that disrupt the compositional, stylistic, and spatial illusionism of the artist’s works. Analyzing these features—which range from architectural ruins with marginal figures that serve as surrogate beholders, to the proliferation of globes, doorways, oculi, and windows—my work seeks to demonstrate that de Vos conceived of the sacred image as a distinctively liminal object and actively sought to convey that liminality through his art, encouraging his viewers to become self-consciously aware of the mediating role of religious images.