I am currently researching and writing about the following subjects:
Rococo Design in Germany and Scandinavia.
Recent research has analyzed the culture of the artist in eighteenth-century Bavaria, the opportunities for artists to express their creativity in that art world, and the various meanings that rococo ornament could bear in specifically Germanic contexts. Some of this research has centered on the print designer Carl Pier (b. 1717); other research has focused on the most alluring and celebrated Bavarian rococo church, the Wieskirche, designed by the Zimmermann brothers and finished in 1754. I am currently researching rococo prints in all their multifaceted abundance. This will culminate in a book on German Rococo design.
Materiality and the History of Art.
Building off several earlier publications on the relationship between material culture and art history, I am working on a book that summarizes some of the methodological problems posed by emphasizing materiality when interpreting a work of art. In the Vienna School of Art History, notably the thinking of Alois Riegl, there is an alternative path for understanding the significance of art, one less reliant on the concept of the image and more on the status of the artwork as an object. Modern art history has largely not taken that path, but I am pursuing it.
Interpreting Eighteenth-Century Porcelain.
I have a longstanding interest in eighteenth-century porcelain: the history of its production, its aesthetics, and the ways in which it can be interpreted. Three recent articles of mine have analyzed porcelain objects, and I continue to think that porcelain should hold a bigger place in art history, especially eighteenth-century art history, than it does.
Historical Climatology and Cats.
Seemingly unrelated, but actually they are connected through the non-human turn in academic thought, recent frameworks that have sought to decenter humanity from historical understanding. I am interested in questions of how we understand climate change through art, which has led to guest editing an issue of Journal18 #16 titled COLD, which will appear in Fall 2023. Likewise, thinking about how cats influenced artists has led to a study, co-authored with Amy Freund and also published in Journal18, on the relationship between felines and the act of painting. A second cats article is in preparation.