Download Complete Vitae HERE (pdf)
EDUCATION
Ph.D., 2005 University of California, Berkeley, History of Art
Dissertation: "The Despair of the Physical: Materialism in George Santayana and Henri Matisse, 1900-1950"
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
Project: The Authority of Things: 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
"The Two Formalisms," 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," French Assoc. of Am. 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 Legacies, Courtauld, Feb. 2011
"Richard Neutra's Design Theory," Post-45 Conference, Brown University, Nov. 2010
"Who Cares Who Speaks?: Audience in Contemporary Art," panel chair, SECAC, Oct. 2010
"Matisse, Form and Affect," Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, June 2010
"Neuroaesthetics: For and Against," chair, double session, Amer. Soc. for Aesthetics, Apr. 2010
"Matisse, Form and Affect," Art Institute of Chicago, "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917," April 2010
"Intention and Interpretation," panel co-chair, double session at CAA, 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 and Wallace Stevens in 1923," 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
> Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2013)
"What I am after, above all, is expression," Henri Matisse declared. Matisse believed that through the careful arrangement of line and color he could transmit his feelings directly to the minds and bodies of his viewers. Yet Matisse continually struggled with the reality that his feelings were misunderstood--or simply ignored--by viewers of his art. Matisse's work oscillates between emphatic overall visual designs that encompass the viewer and an inward turning blockage of visual access. Moreover, this study confronts modernism's dissatisfactions with representation. A central tenet of modernist thought turns on the effort to overcome representation in the name of something more explicit in its capacity to generate bodily or affective experience. Henri Bergson was one of the most influential advocates of the antirepresentational impulse; his novel theories of memory and freedom gripped a generation of writers, philosophers, psychologists, and artists. Matisse and Bergson worked within and against the context of form and expression that remains in force today.
> Seeing Photographically: The Photographic Foundations of the Avant-Garde
What did photography mean to the avant-garde? While it is commonplace to say photography displaced the pursuit of realism in painting, there is perhaps a more fundamental issue at stake with the rise of photography. Photography changed the very definition of art and put a new pressure on the question of artistic agency. Looking at the work of the key figures of modern photography, including Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Moholy-Nagy, Renger-Patzsch, Ansel Adams and Minor White this book aims to redefine avant-garde practice between the wars in light of a controversial vision of photographic ontology defined at that moment. Moreover, questions about the nature of the photographic medium altered the way other artists conceived of their medium. Focusing on the work of Le Corbusier, Mondrian, and Malevich, I show how photography helped define art more generally in the interwar period.
Select Courses Taught
Seminars
Matisse & Picasso
From Realism to Impressionism, 1863-1872
The Russian Avant-Garde: Painting, Film, Formalism
From Dada to Constructivism, 1916-1923
What is Art?
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
Art Historical Methods
Navigate the titles below for publication details and downloads.
Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism, Univ. of Minnesota Press 2013
Matisse, Basic Artists Series, Phaidon 2014
"You are all proletarians." Review of Adorno & Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto. Radical Philosophy 174 (July/Aug. 2012): 31-33
"Radically Private and Pretty Uncoded." Review of The Affect Theory Reader. Radical Philosophy 172 (Mar./Apr. 2012): 51-53
"'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: 487-506, 2010
"Georg Simmel's Timeless Impressionism," New German Critique 106: 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: 578-92, 2006 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686168]
"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: 115-45, 2004 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686194]
Translation of Max Horkheimer, "Schopenhauer and Society," qui parle 15:1: 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: 205-12, 2004 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686181]
"Shaken Realism," Review Essay of Michael Fried, Menzel's Realism, qui parle 14:1: 123-58, 2003 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686168]
"Transparency and Mediation: On Frank Lloyd Wright's Utopian Imagination," Northwestern Journal of Art History: 10-21, 2001