“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”

—bell hooks

Teaching graduate and undergraduate courses on art and visual culture of the nineteenth century and beyond, I see my role as an educator as a lamplighter: igniting the minds of my students so that they can learn to look critically and think for themselves.

As a settler-scholar on the traditional, ancestral, occupied, and unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) people, I am constantly considering the ways in which my course materials are intricately bound with histories of colonial, imperial, and racialized violence. I am dedicated to understanding the ways in which the history of European art has been shaped by colonial ways of knowing, and more importantly, how other epistemologies might be brought to bear on my teaching, learning, and thinking.

Recent Graduate Seminars

Realism(s)

What is the relationship between art and reality? Focusing particularly on its nineteenth-century iteration, this course interrogates the meaning of “Realism” in the corpus of European art and art historical discourse. What does it mean for art to be “real” or “realistic”? Core themes will include materiality, the emergence of photography, the social history of art, art and empiricism, and art’s relationship to semiotics. Assignments focus on strengthening the skills and methodologies of art history including close reading, critical literature reviews, and building annotated bibliographies.

Curatorial Praxis: Caring for, Collecting, and Curating Historical Art, Archives, and Cultural Belongings

This practice-based seminar uses experiential learning to cultivate skills and best practices of curatorial practice. Through a number of long-term, collaborative projects, we will explore some of the elements of the complicated job of “curator,” including exhibition building, collections management, acquisitions, condition reporting, conservation and care, community engagement and access, and public-facing scholarship. Working primarily with on-campus collections, the course focuses specifically on curatorial approaches to historical art, objects, cultural belongings, and archives. “Historical” is here broadly (and not at all definitively) conceived as those objects whose makers are no longer living, posing the fundamental challenge of how best to care for objects when their originators are no longer available as resources for guidance. What does curatorial care look like, and how is it situational? Moreover, how does the challenge of “curating the historical” contend with the exigency of speaking to the living public in a time of multiple, overlapping crises on both global and local scales?

Reinventing the Earth: Art, Ecology, and Evolution in the Nineteenth Century

This course investigates the intersections between European art, visual culture, and the scientific discourses of evolution and ecology at the time of their emergence, namely, the “long” nineteenth century (roughly 1789-1914). Ecocritical approaches to art history (and the humanities at large) have been made all the more exigent by mounting climate crises, the anthropogenic causes of which are rooted in nineteenth-century industrialism as well as the ecocidal effects of imperial-colonialism. Whether consciously or not, artists in the so-called “century of landscape” were often the first recorders of climatic and atmospheric shifts. So too were they bound up in the processes of documenting and collecting natural specimens that enabled (and continue to enable) the systematic study of the natural world. In the spirit of what Elizabeth Grosz has called a “humanities beyond the human,” this course seeks to understand the ways in which the visual arts both reflected and inflected upon changing attitudes toward the earth and its inhabitants, homo sapiens or otherwise.

Recent Undergraduate Courses

Visual Culture in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution (1715-1830)

The eighteenth century inaugurated a series of profound social and geopolitical changes throughout Europe and the world at large. This course tracks the artistic responses to the political and cultural revolutions beginning with the death of King Louis XIV of France (1715) throughout the “Romantic” revolutions of the 1830s, as well as the role that art and visual culture played in shaping the discourses surrounding these events. While attending most closely to European art, we will look also to its ripple effects in the Americas and the Caribbean, examining how the forces of colonialism acted through and upon material and visual culture in the so-called “Age of Enlightenment.”

Nineteenth-Century Art and Social Space

The nineteenth century was a period of continuous revolution and reinvention. This course examines how art and visual culture in Europe and America both reflected and shaped the cultural discourses of politics, class, gender, race, religion, and science that accompanied these ongoing changes. Particular attention will be paid to processes of industrialization, urbanism, and colonialism and their effects on art’s making and reception from the French Revolution (1789) through the beginning of World War I (1914). In addition to painting, drawing, and sculpture, we will chart the development of emerging media from new printmaking technologies to photography and early film.

The Triumph and Demise of Modernism

This course tracks the major themes and practices in artistic production in early twentieth-century Europe and North America known collectively as “Modernism,” from the bold expressionism of the turn of the century to the seemingly total abstraction of the 1950s.  Situating visual and material culture within the historical contexts of the two World Wars, the boom of consumer capitalism, and new forms of colonial expansion, our course will interrogate the definitions and limits of “modernism” and “modernity” within the history of art.