Biography

My research and teaching address early modern Italian art, global early modernisms, and community and socially-engaged art historical practices.

I hold a BA in Humanities and Art from the University of New Hampshire (2001); an MA (2003) and a PhD in Art History from Rutgers University (2009). I have taught in the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University since 2012. I was recently named an inaugural Distinguished Scholar in Public Humanities by Case Western Reserve University; read more here.

My most recent book, Italy by Way of India: Translating Art and Devotion in the Early Modern World (Brepols | Harvey Miller, 2021) considers how cultural production between India and Italy shaped both European perceptions of India and the development of an Indian Christian art during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In so doing, it defies Eurocentric histories of the ‘Renaissance’ and of global circulation. I have written two other books: Exporting Caravaggio: the Crucifixion of Saint Andrew (Giles, 2017) uses a single painting by Caravaggio as a point of departure to discuss how the mobility of objects and the history of collecting shape the interpretation of canonical works of art. Faith, Gender, and the Senses in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art: Interpreting the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas (co-authored with Lisa M. Rafanelli, Ashgate, 2015) considers how representations of these two popular Renaissance subjects together engaged with contemporary theories of the senses and definitions of gender. I have also published essays in Art Journal, Sixteenth Century Journal, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Open Arts Journal, Arte Veneta and in Art, Mobility, and Exchange (Routledge, 2020) and Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions (Ashgate 2014), and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Publicly Engaged Scholarship (expected 2024). Together with my students, I am the founder of Baroque Without Boundaries, a digital mapping intervention that challenges the parameters of the early modern canon.

My community-engaged Art Historical practice now focuses on two major projects: Pressing Matters and collaborative work with LAND Studio on The City is Our Museum, an app that curates the public art in Cleveland.  Both work with non-profit organizations in Cleveland in order to foster collaborative opportunities between CWRU students and community organizations, and to put art history into practice for the greater good.  To read more about these initiatives, click here. 

Prior to joining the faculty at CWRU in 2012, I taught at the State University of New York, Oswego and at Marlboro College in Vermont. I was a curatorial assistant at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University, and at the Morgan Library in New York. I have been the recipient of a number of awards and grants, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Samuel H. Kress grant in Renaissance Art History.