I am an educator, scholar, and academic program leader who has worked in universities and museums for almost two decades. Guided by a comprehensive understanding of learning theory and years of experience teaching, I create innovative curricula and educational materials for academic and museum settings. My work is grounded in disciplinary research, interpretive goals, and a thoughtful consideration of the learner experience.
Curriculum Development
“The M&S minor gave me more than I could ever have asked for. This was actually my favorite department at the university.”
Crafting Learning
I direct the Program in Museums and Society at the Johns Hopkins University, where I oversee a robust, innovative curriculum anchored in collaborative public scholarship and community based learning. Program courses culminate in exhibitions, oral history archives, museum education programs, publications, microsites, visitor research and other publicly engaged activity. Such public projects are developed in partnership with galleries, libraries, archives, museums, or heritage sites and serve both program goals and the goals of community partners both on and off campus. Since 2017, I have been collaborating especially closely with the Baltimore Museum of Art. This partnership has now become a school-level effort governed by an MOU and it is on the cusp of becoming a university-wide initiative to integrate educational and research activities across JHU and the BMA.
Collaboration
I work actively to develop productive collaborations with partners both inside and outside academia. My article "The Practicum Course Model: Embracing the Museum-University Culture Clash" (Journal of Museum Education, Winter 2016) shared lessons learned from years of developing such partnerships while my co-authored introduction to Advocating for Art History (Vernon Press, 2026), argues for the importance of building a responsive discipline that takes into account local context and needs.
Collections-based teaching
“Thank you for teaching the intro to museums class so much! It was by far my favorite class of the semester! I really enjoyed the content of the class and I am so excited to see what else I am going to experience from the Museums and Society program.”
My pedagogy allies the conceptual with the applied in the study of visual and material culture. This often requires conceptualizing new methods of teaching in the university classroom and experimenting with related museum interpretation. The template I created in the Omeka platform for the JHU Collections Web offers a method for building and interpreting collections online that builds understanding of collection catalogues and their associated data as socially embedded and historical in their own right.
I developed a toolkit to support inclusive approaches to collections-based teaching in museum studies and allied cultural fields of art-history, visual and material culture studies, archeology and anthropology. The toolkit highlights current academic scholarship as well as experiments in museum practice that offer a frame for tackling complex interpretive scenarios with no clear-cut answers. What best practices and canonical narratives in art museums (and art-history) need challenging and rethinking? How might we create more equity in how we interpret and display art from around the world? How might an artwork be made truly accessible?
I am also involved in developing engaged models for community-based learning (CBL) and in studying their impact on students. My article “The Canon as Provocation: Partnering with Museums for the Future of Art History Teaching” (Art History Pedagogy & Practice, September 2019) spoke to the value and relevance of museum-based education in art-history.
Evaluation work
Museum evaluation is an important part of my practice. I work alongside students on front-end or formative evaluation for every interpretive project in which I am involved e.g. interviews with museum visitors as part of the course Object Encounters at the BMA, prototyping for American Selfie, large-scale surveys in preparation for the oral history project Housing Our Story. I also assess the learning impact of the project on student creators and on audiences for the purposes of reporting. Collaborating with the Maryland Zoo brought an opportunity to work with an evaluation consultant, and I conducted usability testing for my digital project The JHU Collections Web.
I am also trained in the protection of human research participants and have successfully shepherded projects through university institutional review boards.
Evaluation is also a routine part of directing an academic program of study and of teaching. Beyond the standard university practice of student evaluations, I incorporate mid-semester evaluations in my courses, have crafted custom evaluation questions for practicum courses in the program that I direct, and created an exit survey for graduating seniors. I am also responsible for assessing course evaluations as part of the process of appointing and renewing adjunct instructors.
Philosophy
“As someone who took this class on a whim, I never expected it to become one of my favorites. I really feel like I have a much deeper way to look at and understand museums and other large social institutions.”
Museums, archives, and historic sites hold tremendous creative power over cultural heritage, collective identity, and social memory. A principle goal of my university teaching is to help students develop the skills to be critical interpreters of these consequential institutions. I strive to help students realize that by looking carefully and thoughtfully at museums, broadly defined, they can begin to ask questions and explore ideas that will lead them to a richer understanding of their world.
At the end of the day, I want students to see that humanistic inquiry matters beyond the ivory tower, to develop the tools to engage effectively with difficult concepts, and to feel empowered to encounter, and effect change in, institutions of power and privilege from which many in our society still feel excluded.