I’m an art historian and artist specializing in 18th and 19th century European, and specifically French, visual culture. I’m completing my first book project, Creative Destruction on how artists used graphic satire as a vehicle to criticize the emergence of a free market for art at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. My second project, Papermania looks at scrapbooks and scrap sheets in nineteenth-century Europe and North America. I’m interested in the parallels between the 19th century scrapbook boom and image sharing apps on mobile media today, specifically the overlapping themes of miniaturization, mass customization, and curatorial consumption.
Scholarship
Publications
Journal Articles
Submitted. “Potshot Pastimes: The Cahier des Charges in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris.” Marilyn Kushner ed. “Between the covers: Albums in the Nineteenth Century.” Special Issue. Visual Resources.
2017. "Le regard miroité, miroité: Le Voyage d'Encausse et le récit de voyage humoristique." Biblio 17. 73-81.
2016. "A Satirical Image against Jean-Baptiste Greuze: Reputation, Professional Association, and the Public Woman." Eighteenth-Century Studies. 50.1: 27-51.
2015. "Repeat Offenders: Reprinting Visual Satire Across France's Long Eighteenth Century." Revue d'art Canada/Canadian Art Review , 40.1 (Spring): 17-26.
Book Chapters
In press. “Monsieur Crouton, the Shop Sign Painter: The Unexceptional Artist in Early Nineteenth-Century Print.” Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France. Ed.s Richard Taws and Iris Moon. Bloomsbury.
2019. “L’autoréférence dans l’album comique. Les illustrateurs et les éditeurs contre eux-mêmes dans la Restauration.”L’Image railleuse. Ed.s Laurent Baridon, Dominic Hardy, Frédérique Desbussions. INHA Les Collections électroniques.
2018. "A Physiology of the Inglorious Artist in Early 19th century Paris." in The Mediatization of the Artist. Ed.s Rachel Esner, Sandra Kisters. Palgrave MacMillan.
2015. "How to Burlesque a Burlesquer: Paul Sandby's A New Dunciad against William Hogarth." in The Power of Satire. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishers: 105-133.
Book Reviews2020. Review of Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture by Patricia Mainardi, RACAR: Revue d’art Canadien/Canadian Art Review. 45 (1): 93-94.
Presentations
Invited Talks
2019. “Technological Innovations and Mass Consumption in the Nineteenth Century” Science, Trust and Society: Inclusive Culture Under Siege. Royal Society of Canada Ottawa Symposium, Ottawa, ON, Nov. 21
2019. Roundtable Panelist. “To Catch the Eye: A Visual Culture Program Discussing the Digital Relevancy of History of Moving Pictures before the 20th Century.” Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, May 16.
2017. “The Inglorious Artist in Early 19th Century Paris: Between the Salon System and Mass Culture.” Fordham University, New York City, NY, Oct. 10.
”Image satiriques de la vie artistique à Paris.” La satire visuelle et l’indiscipline de l’histoire de l’art. Université de Québec à Montréal, Oct. 26
Selected Conference Participation
2018. Chaired panel with Cynthia Roman. “Collecting, Cutting, and Collaging.” College Art Association (CAA). Los Angeles, Feb. 21-24.
2018. “The Status of the Artist in the Wake of the French Revolution: A Crisis told through Caricature.” CAA, “The 1790s,” LA, CA Feb.23
2017. “Between Emblem and Expression: Ways of Reading Early 19th Century French Social Caricature.” Regard actuel sur l’art et l’architecture du dix-neuvième siecle.Montreal, QC. Sept. 22.
2017. ”Scènes de l’Artiste Inglorieux”: Honoré de Balzac, Henri Murger, and Graphic Satire from the Revolution through the July Monarchy.” Dahesh Museum/AHNCA Symposium in Nineteenth-Century Art. March 26.
2016. Chaired panel with Jessica Fripp. “Satirical Images: Between Sociability, Animosity, and Entertainment.” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Pittsburgh, PA, March 31-Apr. 3.
Teaching
2018 Art in the Age of Revolution, Fall, ARTH 370 Art & Art History Department, UNC Chapel Hill
2015-7 The Visual Culture of News, Past & Present, Summer 2015, Spring 2017 Art, Art History, and Visual Studies Department, Writing Intensive seminar, Duke University
2015 Art in Life. The History of Art & Architecture, from the 15th to the 20th Century, Summer Art, Art History, and Visual Studies Department, Duke University
2013 Laughing Matters: Interpreting and Contextualizing Modern Caricature, Fall Thompson Writing Program, Writing 101: Academic Writing, Duke University
Digital Humanities
Image Analysis
I believe visual culture studies has been marginalized because of the ways it contradicts the art world’s current market economy where exceptionality, uniqueness, singularity, and rarity are emphasized. Visual culture, on the other hand, often exists in multiples, is produced in large scale, and explores repetitive and overlapping themes.
Visual culture studies is productively disruptive and I have adapted research methodologies that can represent the multiplicity, scale, and thematic repetitions of the corpuses I excavate from library and museum collections.
I work in Qualitative Data Analysis software, specifically NVivo, which I use as a personal research database to catalog and analyze the images I work with. I borrow methodologies from the social sciences and library sciences to produce bibliographic entries for my images and to “tag” them for relevant analytical categories.
For videos on my use of NVivo, see this video where I describe my use of NVivo in the Creative Destruction project and this tour of my NVivo database.
I am currently exploring methods of sharing my personal research databases more widely. I plan to publish the personal research database assembled for my first book project, Creative Destruction, alongside the book’s publication. I currently plan to publish this database with Omeka.
Workshops
I conduct in person and virtual workshops on digital methodologies in the Humanities. I offer workshops on databases for personal research use, ranging from Filemaker and Access to Qualitative Data Analysis software. I also offer workshops on using Photoshop in the Humanities. Please reach out if you’re interested in hosting a workshop.
See page 4 and 5 of My CV for a list of the workshops I have offered internationally since 2013.
Consulting
I am available as a consultant to assist you with your work in image analysis, whether it is in in NVivo, Photoshop, Filemaker or Microsoft Access, or Microsoft Excel.
Rather than do the work for you, my goal is to educate you and support you in your work so that I leave you with new tools you can continue to use in your research. Let’s work together to devise a flexible plan for how I can support you or your team in your image analysis research through virtual or in person workshops, support sessions, step-by-step guides, or other means best adapted to your needs, budget, and timeline for your project.
Reach out to me through my contact form to set up a free hour-long initial consultation and to ask about my hourly rate.
Community Engagement
Curation
2017-18 (Oct.-Feb.) Humans of Paris: Picturing Social Life in the 19th Century Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library
This exhibit explored early nineteenth-century sketch writing and illustration for popular audiences in Paris, most notably the Physiologies pamphlets and large panoramic folios such as La Grande Ville. Illustrated by renowned artists like Honoré Daumier and Paul Gavarni, these objects elaborated an encyclopedia of caricatural social types. I put these objects into conversation with the larger history of the popular printed image in the early nineteenth-century, the science of physiognomy and phrenology in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the history of spectacular entertainment, most notably early film and the magic lantern.
2014 (Feb.-June) Night in the City of Light: Paris' Cabaret, 1881-1914 Nasher Museum of Art Academic Focus Gallery; Cheap Thrills: The Highs and Lows of Paris's Cabaret Culture, 1880-1939 Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library
This pair of exhibits, co-curated with my colleagues Alexis Clark, Emilie Luse, and Laura Moure Cecchini, sought to expose audiences to France’s vibrant turn-of-the-century cabaret culture via the print matter that emanated from that culture itself. Our goal was to provide visitors with a multi-sensory experience of cabaret culture in order to contextualize its sonic environment, the raucous and radical atmosphere of our cabaret venues and Montmarte, and to expose them to the tactile experience of the consumer culture that arose out of this culture, which permitted audiences and fans to own sheet music themselves. Our exhibit thus drew upon illustrated sheet music from periodicals and magazines, tour guide books, maps, and posters. 
The Duke New Music Ensemble interpreted the sheet music we recovered and visitors in both spaces were able to listen to their compositions while they viewed the exhibit.
Take a look at a blog post on the Nasher exhibit, and the online exhibit for the Rubenstein exhibit.
2012-3 (Dec.-Mar.) A Mockery of Justice: Caricature and the Dreyfus Affair Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Curated with my colleagues Alexis Clark and Emilie Luse under the supervision of Neil McWilliam, this exhibit introduced visitors to the caricatures and imagery produced around the Dreyfus Affair. Our goal in this exhibit was to go beyond the mere presentation of this rich and difficult imagery. Rather, we wanted to provide visitors with a sense of the visual landscape within which the Dreyfus caricatures fit, which included antisemitic imagery more generally, news items that provided illustrations of the prolonged Dreyfus case from L’Illustration and Le Petit Journal, and satires that targeted issues that resurfaced anew during the Dreyfus Affair including infighting amongst the periodical press, the xenophobism in early French nationalism, and the growth of radical leftist periodicals and journalists.
Public Programming
I have a rich background in museum public programming from 2006 to today, developing and delivering programming in Canada and the United States at a variety of arts and heritage institutions. It is a central part of my convictions about the accessibility of art to ensure that arts education is available to publics traditionally neglected and marginalized by arts institutions and post-secondary education.
See page 7 My CV for a full account of my experience and continued work engaging the general public.
