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
"What Was Formalism?," Rutgers University, Center for Cultural Analysis, Oct. 2012
Recent public lectures and panels chaired
"The Anti-Intentional Fallacy: A Genealogy," Rhetoric and Critical Theory, Emory University, Apr. 2012
"Against Immanence: Deleuze's Dualism of Affect and Meaning," French Association of American Studies (AFEA), Brest, France, May 2011
"Matisse Between Manet and Cezanne," Futures Series, Johns Hopkins University, April 2011
"Painting as Affect Machine," Bergson and His Postmodern and Immanent Legacies, The Courtauld Institute of Art, February 2011
"Richard Neutra's Design Theory," Post-45 Conference, Brown University, Nov. 2010"Who Cares Who Speaks?: The Problem of Audience in Contemporary Art," panel chair, SECAC, Oct. 2010
"Matisse, Form and Affect," Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, June 2010
"Neuroaesthetics: For and Against," panel chair, double session, Pacific Division of the American Society for Aesthetics, April 2010
"Matisse, Form and Affect," Art Institute of Chicago, for exhibition "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917," April 2010
"Intention and Interpretation," panel co-chair, double session at College Art Association 98th Annual Conference, Chicago, February 2010
"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," CAA, 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," CAA, 2006
"The Pleasures of Merely Circulating: Matisse's Woman Before an Aquarium and Stevens's Harmonium," CAA, 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 (University of Minnesota Press)
"I believe only in Instinct," Henri Matisse declared. Matisse believed that through the careful arrangement of line and color he could transmit his feelings directly to the mind and body of his viewers; and yet he continually confronted the fact that his feelings were misunderstood or simply ignored. Matisse's art oscillates between these expressive poles: at once pursuing a desire for expressive command over the viewer and a lingering awareness of the impossibility of making himself known. His dilemma was shared by several modernist thinkers of his time and finds immediate parallels in the widely influential writings of philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson's novel theories of memory and freedom gripped a generation of artists, writers, philosophers and psychologists, and his experiments using hypnosis and "psychic research" were closely paralleled by Matisse's own vision of painting as the production of hypnotic trances. Working both with and against Bergson's new psychology of memory, Matisse developed a powerful variant of modernist practice that endures today.
> The Architecture of Affect: Form and Intention in the Avant-Garde, 1914-1924
This study traces the role affect and intention plays in the history of modernist art and design from Kandinsky to Surrealism. Chapters include a survey of the first affective turn in the writings of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier; intentionality and anti-intentionality in De Stijl; theories of psychological control at the Bauhaus; R. M. Schindler's anti-affective formalism; Neutra's micrological account of affective design; and a conclusion about the apotheosis of affect under postmodernism which includes a re-evaulation of Reyner Banham's seminal account of Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) and Colin Rowe's New Critical appropriation of Terragni and Le Corbusier. I aim to show both the origins of present day concerns with affect and the logical consequences of that commitment.
Select Courses Taught
Seminars
Matisse & Picasso
From Realism to Impressionism, 1863-1872
Deconstruction in the Visual Arts
Why Photography Matters Now
From Dada to Constructivism, 1916-1923
Affective Aesthetics Then and 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
After Cezanne
Introduction to Art Theory
Navigate the titles below for publication details and downloads.
Matisse, Bergson and the Philosophical Temper of Modernism, forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press
Matisse, Basic Artists Series, Phaidon Books, 2011
"'Danger in the Smallest Dose': Richard Neutra's Design Theory," Design and Culture 3:2, spring 2011
"Paul Valery's Blood Meridian," nonsite.org, spring 2011
"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. 578-592, 2006
"Looking Into Surfaces," in David D. Kim (ed.), Georg Simmel in Translation, Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 229-261, 2006
"Biological Poetry: Santayana's Aesthetics," qui parle 15:1, pp. 115-145, 2004 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686194]
Translation of Max Horkheimer, "Schopenhauer and Society," qui parle 15:1, pp. 85-96, 2004 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686192]
"On Max Horkheimer's 'Schopenhauer and Society,'" qui parle 15:1, pp. 81-83, 2004 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686191]
"Clement Greenberg's Late Writings," &qui parle 14:2, pp. 205-212, 2004nbsp; [http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686181]
"Shaken Realism," Review Essay of Michael Fried, Menzel's Realism, qui parle 14:1, pp. 123-58, 2003 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686168]
"Transparency and Mediation: On Frank Lloyd Wright's Utopian Imagination," Northwestern Journal of Art History, pp. 10-21, 2001