Santa Clara University

I earned my PhD from USC in Art History with a dissertation on Mark Rothko's early paintings and drawings in relation to Jewish identity in the US in the 1930s and 1940s. In addition to publishing on his work, I have written about Jewish American visual culture, the 20th-Century art market, women art dealers, and embroidery, among other topics. I edited a special issue--Jewishness in the Visual Field--of Modern Jewish Studies (MJS) and I am a member of the MJS editorial board. I co-edited a book on teaching art history with digital technologies (2008) and sit on the advisory board for Art History Pedagogy and Practice, a journal dedicated to studying the pedagogy of art history. I curated Eye on the Sixties: Vision, Body, and Soul, Selections from the Collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, which was exhibited here on campus in 2008. My most recent book (published by Lund-Humphries in their Northern Lights series)--Embroidering the Landscape: Art, Women and the Environment in British North America, 1740-1770--treats large landscape-themed embroideries made by women in British North America from an ecocritical perspective. My next project is a book about the broad history of American women in the visual arts. I sit on the editorial board of American Art, published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

I teach a range of courses, mostly based in the art, material, and visual culture of British North America and the United States. The topics of these courses include the history of photography in the US, American women in the visual arts, 19th C. art and culture, and 20th C art. I also teach the historiography/methods course for our department as well as a Cultures & Ideas sequence.

In a former life I was a practicing artist and I still draw when I'm on vacation.