Download Complete Vitae HERE (pdf)
EDUCATION
Ph.D., 2005 University of California, Berkeley, History of Art
Dissertation: "The Despair of the Physical: Matisse, Santayana and the Philosophical Temper of Modernism"
B.A., 1994 University of California, Berkeley, History of Art (with distinction), cum laude
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
2010- Assistant Professor, European Art, 1880-1950, Emory University
2007-10 Assistant Professor, Twentieth Century Art, Virginia Commonwealth University
2005-06 Visiting Professor, Twentieth Century Art, University of California, Berkeley
2003-05 Editor, Qui Parle, http://quiparle.berkeley.edu
SELECTED FELLOWSHIPS
2006-07 Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
Research Project: The Authority of Things: The Cathedral Facade in Modernist Painting, 1890-1960
2004 Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellowship, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
2000-01 Deutscher Akademische Austauschdienst, Berlin, Germany
1997-98 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, Northwestern University
Upcoming public lectures
"Intention and Interpretation," panel co-chair, double session at College Art Association 98th Annual Conference, Chicago, February 2010
"Matisse, Form and Affect," Art Institute of Chicago, for exhibition "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917," April 6, 2010
"Neuroaesthetics: For and Against," panel chair, double session, Pacific Division of the American Society for Aesthetics, April 7-8, 2010
"'Danger in the Smallest Dose': Neutra, Schindler, and the Problem of Affect in Modernist Architecture," Actualite de la recherche, University of Geneva, May 2010
"Matisse, Form and Affect," talk to be delivered for the re-opening of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, June 12, 2010
Recent public lectures and panels chaired
"Matisse, Bergson, and the Pathology of Perception," College Art Association, 2009
"Matisse and Mimesis," The College of William & Mary, 2008
"From Postmodernism to Modernism: Painting as Affect Machine," Virginia Commonwealth University, 2008
"'The Hypnotic Power of the Image': Matisse and Mimesis," Courtauld Institute of Art, 2008
"Monet After Impressionism," Curator-Scholar Talk with Mary Morton, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007
"'Irresistible Dictation': Matisse and Personality," College Art Association, 2007
"The Authority of Things: The Cathedral Facade from Monet to Matisse," Getty Research Institute, 2007
"Does the Psyche Exist?" Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, 2006
"Georg Simmel's Impressionism," Harvard University, 2005
Co-Chair, "Jackson Pollock's Afterlife, 1956-2006," College Art Association, 2006
"The Pleasures of Merely Circulating: Matisse's Woman Before an Aquarium and Stevens's Harmonium," CAA, 2005
"Proust and Valery at the Museum," Crocker Art Museum, 2005
"Winckelmann and the Lucretian Sublime," International Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, 2003
Chair and Respondent, "Schopenhauer's Corps(e)," Modern Language Association, San Diego, 2003
"The Rigors of Bildung in Schlegel, Heine, and the Brothers Grimm," Yale University, 2002
"The Image in the Cathedral: Goethe After Benjamin," Yale University, 2001
Major fields
> Modernism from Manet to Pollock
> Form, affect, expression and intentionality
Major Projects
> Matisse, Bergson and the Philosophical Temper of Modernism (The University of Minnesota Press)
"Feeling is all," Matisse boldly told his students. Indeed, Matisse fantasized that through the careful manipulation of line and color "the feelings and the soul of the painter will travel without difficulty into the spirit of he who looks on." And yet the artist continually confronted the fact that his feelings were misunderstood by viewers. "Nothing can ever be transmitted," he ruefully declared in skeptical moments. Matisse's pictorial practice oscillates between these two expressive poles: at once pursuing a desire for expressive command over the viewer and a lingering awareness of the impossibility of expressive transfer. This apparent dilemma grows from Matisse's ambivalent embrace of a common strain of modernist thinking, a doctrine I call "affective formalism." Affective formalism was given its most cogent formulation in the influential writings of Matisse's contemporary, the philosopher Henri Bergson. Working both with and against Bergson's new psychology of form and affect, Matisse developed a powerful variant of modernist practice that endures until today.
> I am currently completing a translation of French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's writings on art for Fordham University Press.
> Paul Valery: The Audience as Producer
In his famous study of the "Death of the Author" Roland Barthes privileges the writings of Paul Valery as initiating the turn from artist to audience. This study considers the dramatic shift in Valery's account of artistic meaning from intentional agency to audience authority. While his early career is devoted to an art of calculation and control, his later work is committed to a reader driven theory of affective experience. What directs this turn? And is there a deeper foundation that underlies both positions?
> The Poetics of Plasticity: Mid-Century Modernism in Los Angeles
This study traces the history of design theory in mid-century Los Angeles from the impact of Sullivan's Kindergarten Chats to Entenza's Case Study Program. Looking at the discourse and ideals of flexibility, plasticity, pliancy, and adaptability I explore the rise and decline of open planning in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, R. M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, and the Case Study Program.
Select courses taught
Seminars
Matisse & Picasso
From Realism to Impressionism, 1863-1869
Deconstruction in the Visual Arts
Why Photography Matters Now
Surveys
Art in Paris, 1890-1920
From Mondrian to Minimalism: The Life and Death of Abstract Art, 1912-1970
Modern Art at Mid-Century, 1914-1963
Contemporary Art, 1963 to the present
Modern Art and the Museum
Neoclassicism in Modern Art
Introduction to Art Theory
Navigate the titles below for publication details and downloads.
Matisse, Bergson and the Philosophical Temper of Modernism, forthcoming from The University of Minnesota Press
Matisse, Basic Artists Series, Phaidon Books, 2010-11
"'Danger in the Smallest Dose': Richard Neutra's Design Theory," Design and Culture Journal, forthcoming
"Merleau-Ponty, Santayana and the Paradoxes of Animal Faith," British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 18:3, pp. 487-506, 2010
"Georg Simmel's Timeless Impressionism," New German Critique 106, pp. 83-101, 2009
"'Primordial Automatism': George Santayana's Later Aesthetics," Overheard in Seville 25, pp. 20-27, 2007
"Shaken Realism," Review Essay of Michael Fried, Menzel's Realism, Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 4, pp. 578-92, 2006
"Looking Into Surfaces," in David D. Kim (ed.), Georg Simmel in Translation, Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 229-61, 2006
Translation of Max Horkheimer, "Schopenhauer and Society," qui parle 15: 1, pp. 85-96, 2004
"On Max Horkheimer's 'Schopenhauer and Society,'" qui parle 15:1, pp. 81-83, 2004
"Clement Greenberg's Last Book," qui parle 14:2, pp. 205-12, 2004
"Shaken Realism," Review Essay of Michael Fried, Menzel's Realism, qui parle 14:1, pp. 123-58, 2003
"Transparency and Mediation: On Frank Lloyd Wright's Utopian Imagination," Northwestern Journal of Art History, pp. 10-21, 2001