My scholarship encompasses the art of the medieval world and its later museumification, with a growing research interest in the relationship of women and African-Americans to modern American art museums. My interests also include museology more broadly, including museum-based teaching and learning. I am presently co-editing a book about advocating for art history, a volume that will address pressing issues for the discipline’s status in higher education and completing a monograph that reframes the emergence of the American art world by centering the contributions and experiences of Baltimorean women of diverse backgrounds, generations, and cultural roles who shaped the city’s cultural infrastructure in the first half of the twentieth century.
Beyond academic contributions, I am committed to public scholarship, having led over a dozen collaborative curatorial projects with students. These projects range from outdoor interpretive exhibits and temporary art exhibitions to the creation of oral histories, interpretive videos, and podcast episodes.
Books
Advocating for Art History. Co-edited with Cynthia Persinger and Rose Trentinella. (Vernon Press, 2026). Pre-order here.
American Museum Women and the Making of Culture in Modern America (5 of 6 chapters complete)
The Bernward Gospels: Art, Memory and the Episcopate in Medieval Germany. University Park, Penn State Press, 2014. Publication supported by two competitive awards, one from the International Center for Medieval Art with the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and a book subvention from the Medieval Academy of America.
Pedagogy
“A Medievalist Stumbles into an Africanist.” College Art Association Conversations Podcast. December 6, 2019. https://www.collegeart.org/news/category/podcast/
“The Canon as Provocation: Partnering with Museums for the Future of Art History.” Art History Pedagogy & Practice 4.1 (2019)* https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ahpp/vol4/iss1/3/
“Collections-Based Teaching and Social Justice.” Material Collective Blog. January 9, 2019.
“A Low-Tech Approach to Digital Literacy.” JHU Innovative Instructor. July 2016.
"The Practicum Course Model: Embracing the Museum-University Culture Clash." Journal of Museum Education 41.4 (2016): 250-261.*
Art-History and Museum Topics
“Black Activism and the Museum in the Interwar Period: A Baltimore Case Study” U.S. Museum Histories and the Politics of Interpretation: Never Neutral. Edited by Laura Schiavo. Museum Meanings. Routledge Press, 2024.
“Revisiting Contemporary Negro Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art.” With Morgan Dowty and Gamynne Guillotte. Reconstructing Exhibitions in Art Institutions. Edited by Natasha Amadou and Michaela Giebelhausen. Research in Art Museums and Exhibitions. London: Routledge Press, 2023.
"Le Paysage Sensoriel de l'Église et les Images Vers 1200: Le Témoignage du Mitralis de Sicard de Crémone." In Les cinq sens au Moyen Âge. Edited by Eric Palazzo, 669-90. Éditions du Cerf, 2016.
"Bishop and Monk: John the Baptist in the Episcopal Image of Anglo-Saxon England and Ottonian Germany." Envisioning the Medieval Bishop, Edited by Evan Gatti and Sigrid Danielson, 215-248. Medieval Church Studies, 29. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014.
"Picturing the Treasury in Ottonian Art: The Power of Objects and the Art of Memory in the Bernward Gospels." Gesta 50.1 (2012): 19-39.*
"VT CERNIS and The Materiality of Bernwardian Art." In 1000 Jahre St. Michael in Hildesheim: Kirche-Kloster-Stifter, Internationales Symposium des Hornemann Instituts, September 16-18, 2010. Edited by Gerhard Lutz and Angela Weyer, 171-84. Hildesheim: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2012.
"Ornament, Style and Interpreting the Medieval Oliphant at the Walters: A Reconsideration" A New Look at Old Things? [= Journal of the Walters Art Museum 68/69]. Edited by Kathryn B. Gerry and Richard A. Leson, 87-98. 2010/2011.*
"To Touch the Image: Embodying Christ in the Bernward Gospels." Peregrinations 3.1 (2010): 138-73.*
Reviews
“Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum” Book review. History: Reviews of New Books 46.5 (September 2018)
“A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Art at the Walters Art Museum.” Exhibition review. CAAreviews (December 2017)