I am a historian of modern and contemporary US-American visual culture 鈥 particularly painting and photography 鈥 with a research focus on African American artists working in the interwar period, and on historiographies of their artistic production and professional careers. My research focuses on how the politics of modernist style have resulted in the occlusion, exclusion, or conditional art world engagement with African American artists engaged in modernist experimentation 鈥 both in their lifetimes, and in subsequent art historical accounts. I am currently at work on a book project, Aaron Douglas: Art, History, which examines the American artist Aaron Douglas’s (1899鈥1979) syncretic modernism; I am also conducting research for a major new research project which explores the work of Douglas’s generation of artists to professionalise. My work thinks through this generation’s rapid-fire and multidirectional stylistic manoeuvres as a strategic response to the haphazard networks of patronage, support, and mentorship that arose in the inter-war period to support non-white artists 鈥 and, speaking in historiographical terms, as a move that defies well-trodden Greenbergian narratives of straightforward stylistic trajectory.
Education
2021: PhD History of Art, 91制片厂
Supervised by Professor David Peters Corbett
2017: MA History of Art, with special option 鈥楴ew York-London-Paris聽1880-1940,鈥 91制片厂
2015: BA (Hons) History of Art, University of Bristol
Research interests
The visual cultures of the United States, 1830鈥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
Histories of photography
Fellowships, grants, and awards
2022鈥23: Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in American Art 鈥 Smithsonian American Art Museum
2021鈥22: Academic Workshop and Symposium Grant (with Louis Shadwick) 鈥 Terra Foundation for American Art
2019: Immersion Semesters Fellowship, Harvard University 鈥 Terra Foundation for American Art
2018鈥19: Research Travel Grant to the United States 鈥 Terra Foundation for American Art
2018鈥21: CHASE Doctoral Studentship
Publications
In preparation: 鈥溾楿nity Beneath Difference鈥: Richard Bruce Nugent鈥檚 Drawings for Mulattoes (1927), Modernist Esotericism, and the Tarot”
In review: 鈥淎cross Time and Space: Diaspora and the Social Sciences in Aaron Douglas鈥檚 Fisk University Murals (1930),鈥 Art History
In review: 鈥淲here was the Harlem Renaissance? City, Community, and Aaron Douglas鈥檚 Sense of Place,鈥 ARTMargins special issue, 鈥淩eclaiming Urban Space from the Margins,鈥 eds. Lee Ann Custer and Joanna Grabski
2026: “Palmer Hayden’s Submerged Seascapes,”聽Archives of American Art Journal vol. 65, no. 2 (Fall, 2026), pp. 4鈥23
2025: 鈥淕lenn Ligon: All Over The Place,鈥 exhibition review, Burlington Contemporary, https://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/reviews/reviews/glenn-ligon-all-over-the-place
2023: 鈥淎frican American Artists and the New Deal Art Programs: Opportunity, Access, and Community,鈥 book review, caa.reviews, DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2023.75
2022: 鈥楢aron Douglas,鈥 in聽African Modernism in America, 1947鈥67, ed. Perrin Lathrop, exh. cat (Yale and the American Federation of the Arts) 鈥 winner, Association of Art Museum Curators鈥 2023 Curatorial Award for Excellence, 2024 College Art Association Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
Invited lectures, talks, and appearances
2026 (forthcoming): 鈥淭he JFK Assassination, the Zapruder Film, and Cultures of Civilian Surveillance,鈥澛犫淒rawing Blood鈥 podcast
2023: “Palmer Hayden on Paper,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
2023: “Lo茂s Mail Jones’s聽Les F茅tiches, 1938,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
2020: “A Nation at a Crossroads: The United States in Thomas Moran鈥檚 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
2024鈥6: Associate Lecturer in American Art and Photography, University College London
2021鈥22, 23鈥24: Associate Lecturer,聽91制片厂
2019鈥21: Teaching Assistant, 91制片厂
2018鈥22: Guest Lecturer, 91制片厂
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 )
March 2022: “American Art and the Political Imagination,” 91制片厂 (with Louis Shadwick)
October 2020: Third Year Symposium [Online], 91制片厂 (with聽Emma Merkling)
Speaker
April 2026: 鈥淏lack Modernism, Black History: Aaron Douglas at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library,鈥 Association for Art History Annual Conference, the University of Cambridge
October 2020: “Plantation Futures: Aaron Douglas鈥 Aspects of Negro Life,” Third Year Symposium [Online], 91制片厂
June 2019: “Time, Space, and Cultural Inheritance: Aaron Douglas鈥 Fisk University Murals,” Second Year Modern and Contemporary Symposium, 91制片厂
November 2018: “FIRE!! Magazine and the Visualisation of Cultural Conflict” 鈥 “New Voices 2018: Art and Conflict,” Association for Art History, University of Edinburgh
March 2018: “Isabel Bishop, Experience and Fantasy” 鈥 “Experience and American Art,” 91制片厂
February 2018: “Aaron Douglas and Frantz Fanon” 鈥 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” 鈥 “Chasing America,” CHASE School of American Visual Arts and Texts, Courtauld Institute of Art