Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of Museum Studies
Ph.D. 2007 (United States history), Columbia University; B.A. 1997 (history and literature), Harvard University.
Research Interests
Cultural and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th century United States, museum history and theory, history of exhibition and collecting, history of American art and visual culture, history of science and technology, landscape studies and public history.
Teaching
The Historian and The Visual Record
Research
Cultural and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th century United States, museum history and theory, history of exhibition and collecting, history of American art and visual culture, history of science and technology, landscape studies and public history.
Select Publications
Life on Display: Reinventing Museums of Nature and Science in the Twentieth-Century United States, (tentative title) co-authored with Karen Rader, under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press.
“The Tourism of Labor: Photography and Exhibit Making in the Early Twentieth Century United States,” Journal of Modern Craft, forthcoming.
“Professor Carter’s Cabin: Amateur Collectors and Natural History Museums,” Common-place, forthcoming.
“‘An Indirect Influence Upon Industry’: Rockefeller Philanthropies and the Development of Educational Film in the United States, 1935-53,” chapter in Learning with the Lights Off, ed. Marsha Orgeron, Devin Orgeron and Dan Streible (New York: Oxford University Press), 2011.
“The Art of Authority: Exhibits, Exhibit Makers and the Contest for Scientific Status at the American Museum of Natural History, 1920-1940,” Science in Context, special issue on “Lay Observation in the Life Sciences,” vol. 24, issue 2, April 2011, pp. 215-238.
“‘The Direct Medium of the Vision’: Visual Education, Virtual Witnessing and the American Museum of Natural History, 1890-1923,” Journal of Visual Culture, special issue on “Capturing the Moment: Visual Evidence and Eyewitnessing,” v. 10, no. 3, December 2010.
“Specimens, Stereopticons and Science Education: The Evolution of the Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences,” Annals of Iowa, v. 68, no. 1, Winter 2009, pp. 1-35.
“Exhibitionary Complexity: Reconsidering Museums’ Cultural Authority,” American Quarterly, v. 60, no. 4, December 2008, pp. 1143-1153.
“Albert Bickmore: Brief Life of a Museum Impresario, 1839-1914,” Harvard Magazine, September 2008, pp. 38-39.
“From natural history to science: Display and the transformation of American museums of science and nature,” co-authored with Karen Rader, museum + society, vol. 6, issue 2, July 2008, pp. 152-171.
Republication of “From natural history to science: Display and the transformation of American museums of science and nature,” co-authored with Karen Rader, chapter in Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, 2nd edition, ed. Bettina Carbonell (New York: Wiley-Blackwell), 2012.
“‘Mind’ Games,” exhibition review for Museum News, May/June 2008.
“Attraction, Attention, and Desire: Consumer Culture as Pedagogical Paradigm in Natural History Museums in the United States, 1900-1930,” under review, Paedagogica Historica.