About

I study media history and visual culture throughout the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. Across these geographies, I investigate the cross-cultural circulation of images, objects, and ideas, considering how modes of artistic exchange open alternate frameworks of meaning and reception for modern technologies of vision. Working within a networked history of art—one that recognizes the borders of empire and nation as porous—my research and teaching emphasize photography’s itinerant nature and explore the spaces where images connect continents, countries, and cultures.

At Bates, my classes center around questions of vision: who is seeing and who is being seen? Working across diverse lens-based media in the modern period, my teaching emphasizes the cultural contingency of visual representation, and the mutable meaning of material objects within changing political contexts. By examining the transnational circulation of image technologies, my courses work to decenter dominant narratives and artistic origin stories from Europe and the United States. Instead, they constellate histories of image-making that are international, inclusive, and collaborative.

My monograph-in-progress, Portrait Atlas: The Migration of Nineteenth-century Ottoman Photographs, demonstrates the ways in which photographs from the Islamic world cross-pollinate trans-Atlantic geographies, unsettling a place-bound approach to portraiture. I am the co-author, with Sophie Junge, of Survey Practices and Landscape Photography Across the Globe (Routledge, 2022). My research has been published in Trans-Asia Photography, Ars Orientalis, Reading Objects in the Contact-Zone, and Fotogeschichte. I present regularly at international forums, and most recently, spoke at the College Art Association Annual Conference (2024), Other Histories of Photography Symposium at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia (2023), University of North Carolina, Greensboro, School of Art (2023), University of Zurich (2022), Ottoman Cultural Mobilities Workshop at the British Institute & Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey (2021), Expanding Islamic Art History Conference at the University of Vienna (2021) and Silver Atlantic Conference in Paris (2021). My work has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, Historians of Islamic Art, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, and the Getty Research Institute.

COURSES TAUGHT:

AVCS25 – Contemporary Global Photographies

AVC223 – Outside the Frame: A Global History of Photography

AVC228 – Connecting Image Cultures: Artistic Exchange Between the Islamic and European Worlds

AVC267 – From Silhouette to Selfie: Portraiture as a Medium

AVC276/AMST276 – True or False: Documentary Photography

AVC278/ANTH278 – At the Cross-Roads: Art & Migration

AVC233/AMST233 – Decolonizing the Museum

AVC321/GSS321 – Representations of Gender, Labor, and Craft in the Mediterranean

AVC329/AMST329 – Politics of Place: Global Perspectives on American Art

AVC371/ENVR371 – Landscape and Power

EDUCATION:

2017 Ph.D. Boston University, History of Art and Architecture

2012 M.A. Boston University, History of Art and Architecture

2004 B.A. Tufts University, History of Art and Architecture and English

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

“And the Landscape Grows Back: Photographic Futurity in the work of Gohar Dashti,” in “Global Archives of Empire and Photographic Futurity” special issue of Photography & Culture, ed. by Erin Hyde Nolan and Emily Voelker [forthcoming]

“Ottoman Time-scapes: Photo-collage as Diplomacy,” in Ottoman Cultural Mobilities: 19th Century Modes of Travel, Collecting and Display, ed. by Belgin Turan Ozkaya and Sibel Zandi-Sayek (De Gruyter, 2025) [forthcoming]

“Maternal Orientalism: Women’s Work and the Photographs of Jessie Tarbox Beals at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” co-authored with Emily Voelker in Art and Empire: Imperialism and Aesthetic Practices, 1865-1945, ed. by Emily Burns and Alice Price (Routledge, 2025) [forthcoming]

Survey Practice and Landscape Photography Across the Globe co-edited by Sophie Junge (London: Routledge, November 2022).

“Transatlantic Collaborations in the Colonial Archive: Todd Webb’s 1958 UN Commission,” co-authored with Aimée Bessire and Halfan Hashim Magani in Fotogeschichte, special issue on “Photography and Colonialism,” edited by Sophie Junge, January 2022.

Outside of the Frame: Todd Webb’s 1958 Photographs of Africa for the United Nations co-edited with Aimée Bessire (London: Thames & Hudson, 2021).

“Reading Native American Portraits in Ottoman: A Networked Analysis of Photographs in the Abdülhamid II Collection” co-authored with Emily Voelker on Transatlantic Cultures Digital Platform, https://tracs-edition.univ-lr.fr/app/en/index (2021)