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” (Committee: Whitney
Davis, T. J. Clark, and Martin Jay)
M.A., 1996 Johns Hopkins University, History of Art
B.A., 1994 University of California, Berkeley, History of Art (with
distinction), cum laude
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
2007– Assistant Professor, Twentieth Century Art, Department
of Art History, Virginia Commonwealth University
2008, su Visiting Professor, Twentieth Century Art, University of
California, Berkeley
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 Façade
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, College
Art Association 98th Annual Conference, Chicago, February 2010
Recent public lectures and panels chaired
“Matisse, Bergson, and the Pathology of Perception,” College
Art Association Conference, 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, J. Paul
Getty Museum, 2007
“‘Irresistible Dictation’: Matisse and Personality,”
College Art Association Conference, 2007
“The Authority of Things: The Cathedral Facade in Modernist Painting
from Monet to Matisse” J. Paul 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 and Respondent, “Jackson Pollock’s Afterlife, 1956-2006,”
College Art Association Conference, 2006
“The Pleasures of Merely Circulating: Matisse’s Woman Before
an Aquarium and Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium,” College Art
Association Conference, 2005
“Proust and Valéry at the Museum,” Crocker Art Museum,
Sacramento, 2005
“Winckelmann and the Lucretian Sublime,” International Society
for Eighteenth Century Studies Conference, 2003
Chair and Respondent, “Schopenhauer’s Corps(e),” Modern
Language Association Conference, 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 Minimalism
> Historiography of Art History
> Affectivity and the Role of the Viewer
Research Specializations
> Avant-garde Painting and Sculpture in France
> Mimetic Theory from René Girard to Jean-Luc Nancy
> Phenomenology and Deconstruction
> Historical Materialism from Marx to Badiou
Major Projects
> Matisse, Bergson and the Philosophical Temper of Modernism
Who is the philosopher of Modernism? Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein,
Sartre and Adorno are the prime candidates for the position. And yet
we have to confront the fact that these are not the thinkers who shaped
the practice of modern art. Whether we approve or not, the major artists
of the twentieth century fed on everything except the major works of
modern thought, turning instead to Theosophy, Neo-platonism, Zen Buddhism,
Cabalism, Jungian archetypes, and other mystical philosophies for inspiration.
While contemporary critics often ridicule these popular forms of thought,
the fact remains that fashionable philosophies were a driving intellectual
force behind modernism. Looking closely at the work of Matisse, I point
to that role mysticism -- specifically trance, hypnotism, and psychic
automatism -- played at the foundations of his practice, and again how
the occult shaped modernism. Further still, I show the persistence –– or is it the apotheosis? –– of the occult under postmodernism.
> Contagion
This study traces the history of contagion in the visual arts from Seurat
and Gauguin to the entarte Kunst exhibition of 1937. Since Plato denounced
the influence of the arts on the passive public, art theorists and artists
have either recoiled or reveled in the formative power of art to shape
its public. Whether it is embraced or denounced, contagion enforces
a foundational distinction between the artist and his or her public.
Select courses taught
Virginia Commonwealth University
Matisse & Picasso (seminar)
Impressionism: Beginnings and Endings (seminar)
Deconstruction in the Visual Arts (seminar)
Why Photography Matters Now (seminar)
Art in Paris, 1890-1920
Contemporary Art, 1963 to Now
Modern Art at Mid-Century, 1914-1963
University of California, Berkeley
From Mondrian to Minimalism: The Life and Death of Abstract Art, 1912-1970
Matisse & Picasso (seminar)
Modern Art and the Museum
Matisse and Hedonism
Neoclassicism in Modern Art
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Modern and Postmodern Art and Architecture (seminar)
Introduction to Art Theory
Navigate the titles below for publication details and downloads.
Matisse, Bergson, and the Philosophical Temper of Modernism,
forthcoming 2010
"Merleau-Ponty, Santayana and the Paradoxes of Animal Faith," British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Spring 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
"Biological Poetry: George Santayana's Aesthetics," Essays in Criticism (Oxford, UK), forthcoming
"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