I am a an art historian and a scholar of early modern European art. My interest in this era actually began with classical music. My first love was the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach, and from him I discovered Monteverdi, Rameau, Mozart, Haydn, and Gluck. Out of a desire to understand the societies that produced these composers, I turned to history and, only later, to art history. Once I began to study under Prof. Mary D. Sheriff, a noted scholar of eighteenth-century French art and an inspiring teacher, my fate was sealed.
In essence I am a scholar of eighteenth-century decorative arts: porcelain, furniture, woodworking, interior decoration, and lacquer objects. But I maintain significant interests in sculpture, portraiture, and print culture as well. The geographical setting of my scholarship has been Germany, Austria, and more recently Scandinavia. I have written about Meissen porcelain, the sculptures of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, rococo ornamentation, religious architecture, monarchical portraiture, and palatial interiors in Vienna and Stockholm. And of course also images of the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa (1717–1780).
Much of my scholarship is object-oriented as opposed to artist-oriented or culture-oriented. In other words, the object occupies a central place in my scholarship and I am fascinated by questions of how we create meaning from things.
This latter concern has spurred me to write several essays on materiality, material culture studies, and their relation to art-historical practice. These are broader essays of a methodological nature, intended to be applicable to a wide range of art objects.
My education:
B.A. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1992
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1995
Fulbright Scholar, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien, Austria, 1998–1999
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001