Book Projects

Over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, several of the artists who would come to be known as the greatest of all modernist painters made artworks with a similar essential content. From paintings showing the gruesome murders of women by Eugene Delacroix, to the voyeuristic representations of brothel workers by Edgar Degas, and the erotically charged depictions that Paul Gauguin made of his thirteen-year-old Polynesian bride—much of what is now considered the most important modernist art focused repeatedly on either violent, degrading, or demeaning depictions of women. The Art of Misogyny: Toxic Masculinity from Delacroix to Picasso is the first monograph to urgently investigate the behavior of not only these artists, but also that of their most renowned contemporaries—Gustave Courbet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Pablo Picasso—to uncover the ways that artworks reflected negative attitudes towards women which have become a vital underlying element in art history. The book methodically situates the work of these men within each of their respective historical eras to reveal the ways that each not only shocked their contemporaries but exceeded even the harshest of dominant dialogues surrounding gender roles in the period.
Russian Orientalism in a Global Context brings together eleven essays by an international group of scholars to investigate the various ways in which Russia’s artistic praxis was impacted by encounters—both real and imagined—with the cultures and representational traditions of the so-called East or Vostok. Following the Napoleonic wars, the Russian Empire’s aggressive expansionist campaigns led to the annexation of vast new lands in the Caucasus and Central Asia, resulting in the large-scale assimilation of religiously and ethnically diverse groups of people. However, given the country’s perpetually conflicted self-identification as neither fully European nor quintessentially Asian, the established Western European genre of Orientalist painting remained ambiguous and elusive in the Russian context, challenging the fixed Saidian binary that has tended to dominate postcolonial discourse. For Russian artists the demarcations between the “self” and the “other” were much more porous than for their French and British counterparts, resulting in an Orientalist mode that was more prone to hybridity, syncretism, and even self-Orientalization.

Articles and Anthology Chapters

"Manet’s Syphilis: Debility and Adaptation in the 1880s​"

Although it has long been speculated that Edouard Manet may have suffered from and perhaps even died of complications relating to syphilis, the exact nature of his condition has never been clearly established. This essay uses Manet’s letters and the reminiscences of his contemporaries to reconstruct the progression of the artist’s physical decline beginning in January of 1880. By conducting an analysis which takes into account the ways that Manet physically adapted his artistic practice to his increasing debility and pain, this essay creates a fuller picture of the art and life of one of history’s greatest modern painters. 

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"Horizontal Art History: Critiquing Modernist Geographies"

This essay explores the potential that transnational case studies might have for undermining the hierarchical, vertical discourse which has so long characterized the study of Western European Art. Focusing on a single year in artistic production – 1915 – the essay puts in dialogue artworks produced in Russia, France, the Netherlands, and Austria in that year in order to experiment with flattening the hegemony of the “Western” narrative by restoring the authority of a single, unique historical moment.
"Cultural Bilingualism in Eighteenth-Century Russian Portraiture"

This article presents a case study analyzing a portrait of Natalia Petrovna Golitsyna (1741-1837) and members of her extended family over the course of the eighteenth century. Examining such painted representations of members of noble Russian families sheds light on the processes of modernization and Europeanization that Russia’s elite underwent in this century. As the state implemented a top-down Europeanization of the narrow upper class, portraiture became a key tool in showing one’s ability to conform to the new ideals of Russian citizenship through the adoption of fundamental social graces.