I am Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Associate Curator at the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota. My research and curatorial work explore modern and contemporary installation, performance, and media art in ways that forge linkages with overlooked intellectual, social, and institutional histories.

My first book, Happening Pedagogy: Allan Kaprow’s Experiments in Instruction, is under contract at the University of Chicago Press. It situates Kaprow’s environments and happenings in dialogue with forms of experimental pedagogy that he experienced as a student and practiced as a teacher. The first half explores Kaprow’s experience in classes with three central figures at midcentury: Hans Hofmann (Ch. 1), Meyer Schapiro (Ch. 2), and John Cage (Ch. 3). The second half of the book turns to Kaprow’s work as a member of the faculty at Rutgers (Ch. 4) and Stony Brook (Ch. 5), where he taught art history and developed campus-based happenings throughout the 1960s. In dialogue with everything from student yearbooks to extracurricular activities, from reactionary student pranks to radical student politics, these chapters show how Kaprow integrated the lessons from past teachers to rework modernist values of art—namely historical reflection and formal complexity—amidst the sensory patterns and intellectual habits of postwar student culture. My second book project, Demonstration Rooms: Intermedia Art and Pedagogy after 1960, will turn to a set of US artists (Robert Morris, Suzanne Lacy, Sun Ra, Adrian Piper, and Theaster Gates) whose engagement with pedagogy—how they learned and taught—is central to understanding their work. I am also involved with the Getty Research Institute as an author and curator on an interactive digital publication that presents twelve avant-garde scores alongside a video archive of historical and contemporary realizations.

As a mentor to graduate students, I emphasize the following:

  • transforming their individual passions into broadly interesting and viable research projects
  • working with archives
  • alt-ac preparedness (if that's the student's goal)
  • working across disciplines

I am accepting PhD students for Fall 2023. Please contact me via email if you would like to set up a time to speak with me.

Educational Background & Specialties
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Educational Background

  • Ph.D.: Art History and Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago, 2016

Specialties

  • Modern and contemporary art; the social and intellectual history of art; film and media history; historiography and critical theory