I am a historian of modern and contemporary US-American visual culture with a research focus on African American artists working in the interwar period. My current book project focuses on the strategies African American artists practicing in New York in the 1920s and 1930s used in their pursuit of professionalisation, in a segregated art world that largely treated non-white artists as curiosities, “primitives,” or non-existent. I am interested in how artists shifted between modernist styles and genres — rapidly, fluidly, fugitively — to secure opportunities, in defiance of discourses that sought to fix in place a legible and sanctioned “racial art.”
Education
2021: PhD History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art
Supervised by Professor David Peters Corbett
2017: MA History of Art, with special option ‘New York-London-Paris 1880-1940,’ The Courtauld Institute of Art
2015: BA (Hons) History of Art, University of Bristol
Research interests
The visual cultures of the United States, 1830–1950
Critical race art history
The artistic and intellectual culture of the Harlem Renaissance
Art markets, patronage, and professionalisation in interwar New York
Stylistic hybridity
Transnational histories of modernism
Fellowships, grants, and awards
2022–23: Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in American Art — Smithsonian American Art Museum
2021–22: Academic Workshop and Symposium Grant (with Louis Shadwick) — Terra Foundation for American Art
2019: Immersion Semesters Fellowship, Harvard University — Terra Foundation for American Art
2018–19: Research Travel Grant to the United States — Terra Foundation for American Art
2018–21: CHASE Doctoral Studentship
Publications
2024: “Palmer Hayden’s Submerged Seascapes; or, A Case Study in ‘Black Art’,” in preparation for submission to Archives of American Art
2023: “African American Artists and the New Deal Art Programs: Opportunity, Access, and Community,” book review, caa.reviews, DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2023.75
2022: ‘Aaron Douglas,’ in African Modernism in America, 1947–67, ed. Perrin Lathrop, exh. cat (Yale and the American Federation of the Arts) — winner, Association of Art Museum Curators’ 2023 Curatorial Award for Excellence, 2024 College Art Association Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
Invited lectures
2023: “Palmer Hayden on Paper,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
2023: “Loïs Mail Jones’s Les Fétiches, 1938,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
2020: “A Nation at a Crossroads: The United States in Thomas Moran’s Autumn Afternoon, the Wissahickon,” Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (cancelled due to Covid-19 lockdown)
2018: “Unstoppable Progress, Inevitable Decay: Cole, Bellows, and Ruscha and the American Empire,” National Gallery, London
Teaching
2023–24: Associate Lecturer, co-course leader MA Special Option Black Futures: Reimagining Modernism After Critical Race; course leader, BA3 Special Option The Black Imaginary; course leader, BA2 “Approaches: Sexual Politics”
2021–22: Associate Lecturer, BA3 Lessons in Critical Interpretation, The Courtauld Institute of Art
2018–22: Guest Lecturer, “The Harlem Renaissance,” seminar for MA Special Option New York-London-Paris, 1880-1940, The Courtauld Institute of Art
2021: Guest Lecturer, BA3 Special Option Body Politics: Art, Gender and Class in the Victorian Metropolis, The Courtauld Institute of Art
2019–21: Teaching Assistant, BA1 Foundations (Western art, classical to contemporary), The Courtauld Institute of Art
2020: Teaching Assistant, Art History Summer University (introduction to art history for Year 12 students), The Courtauld Institute of Art
Conferences and workshops
Convenor
April 2024: “Day Jobs, Side Hustles, and Second Careers: Considering Black Artists’ Creative Self Support,” Association for Art History Annual Conference, The University of Bristol (with Claire Ittner)
March 2022: “American Art and the Political Imagination,” The Courtauld Institute of Art (with Louis Shadwick)
October 2020: Third Year Symposium [Online], The Courtauld Institute of Art (with Emma Merkling)
Speaker
October 2020: “Plantation Futures: Aaron Douglas’ Aspects of Negro Life,” Third Year Symposium [Online], The Courtauld Institute of Art
June 2019: “Time, Space, and Cultural Inheritance: Aaron Douglas’ Fisk University Murals,” Second Year Modern and Contemporary Symposium, The Courtauld Institute of Art
November 2018: “FIRE!! Magazine and the Visualisation of Cultural Conflict” — “New Voices 2018: Art and Conflict,” Association for Art History, University of Edinburgh
March 2018: “Isabel Bishop, Experience and Fantasy” — “Experience and American Art,” The Courtauld Institute of Art
February 2018: “Aaron Douglas and Frantz Fanon” — CHASE School of American Visual Arts and Texts PhD Workshop, Eccles Centre, British Library
December 2017: “‘The People who are Trivial Outside’: Isabel Bishop, Homosocial Fantasy and Class Spectatorship, 1930-1940” — “Chasing America,” CHASE School of American Visual Arts and Texts, Courtauld Institute of Art