I am a scholar of European visual culture, particularly in relation to resource extraction, scientific knowledge, and media technologies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  I am a Senior Lecturer (i.e., associate professor) in art history at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. I hold a BA from Harvard University (2008) and a PhD from Columbia University (2016). In 2024 I am also an "invited professor" at the Sorbonne in Paris.

My recent publications have explored: art and infrastructure in nineteenth-century Britain (nonsite); resource extraction and German romanticism (Apollo Magazine); and race in eighteenth-century French art (journal18). 

My second book, Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) argues that 'picturing landscape' was the primary means through which European artists grappled with an enormous transformation in how humans relate to the natural world, characterized by the management and extraction of “natural resources” on an unprecedented scale and within a global network. Multi-national in its scope, this book explores how European landscapes pictured the natural environment in relation to specific extractive industries such as mining and timber harvesting as well as emerging concepts about race, climate, and waste operative within the continent and its colonial networks. A portion of the manuscript on Caspar David Friedrich and 'deep time' was published in Representations. 

My prize-winning first book (Art, Science and the Body in Early Romanticism, Cambridge University Press) examines the changing evidentiary authority of the human body at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the work of Henry Fuseli, Philippe de Loutherbourg, and Anne-Louis Girodet, the book reveals how artworks were critical actors in a larger epistemological transformation taking place at the twilight of European Enlightenment. A recent article, "Art after Self Evidence," reflects on how this shift was impacted by gendered and racial hierarchies of the time.

I regularly partner with artists and climate scientists to explore alternative strategies for visualising environmental phenomena in the present day. Building upon previous work with multi-media artists and museums, I am developing a collaborative project on how to visualise the continued presence of coal-powered energy in the twenty-first century. Past work includes partnering with multi-media installation artist Tony Oursler and helping to curate an exhibition on Edgar Degas at The Museum of Modern Art (New York).

I was recently a Saltire Fellow at the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2022) and before that I held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2020). I have previously served as a Research Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, a Pierre and Tana Matisse Fellow at Columbia University, a Visiting Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, and an International Dissertation Research Fellow at the Social Science Research Council.