Old things fascinate me.
How do we understand an object that has come down to us from the past, something that no one living today can claim to have made? This seemingly straightforward question animates all my scholarship.
Historical objects help us to understand the past, of course, and perhaps even imagine being transported to it. Objects bear traces of the worlds that created them, worlds now lost, but they also bear witness to those worlds’ existence on a fundamental level. Yet old things are not just of the past; they exist in the present, in our time and space, and contribute to how we understand our world today. They locate us in the progression of history and continue to shape how we understand our shared human history.
Generally I find the process of creating knowledge about the past through objects to be more elusive, and more complex, than has sometimes been acknowledged. Art History is my preferred lens for approaching these concerns, but my scholarship also draws from strains of thought in history, anthropology, and classical archaeology. Every object both carries the traces of its history and offers questions about how to write history, all at once.