I am a scholar of eighteenth and nineteenth-century American art in a global context. My work centers on the history of globalization with particular interest in intersections of art with histories of technology, natural science, and economics. I have published on topics including media theory, material culture, and ecocriticism.

My 2018 book, The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America, examines the dissolution of landscape painting as a major cultural project in the late nineteenth-century United States and argues that landscape is the genre through which American artists most urgently sought to come to terms with modernity. 

I have just finished a book titled Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and its Legacies, which will be the first synthetic treatment of nineteenth-century US art and empire in a global context. In it, I offer revisionist readings of globally-themed art including landscapes of the Arctic and the tropics, still lifes of imported goods, and ethnographic portraiture. It also tackles the legacy of US imperialism, connecting the metropolitan, Euro-American painters of the past with the more racially diverse global artists of the present. The book will be published by Chicago University Press in 2025.

I received my PhD in art history from Harvard University, and did postdoctoral work at Columbia University’s Society of Fellows. As an assistant professor at UNC, I teach the history of American art from the colonial period to the twentieth century as well as courses on the visual histories of science and economics.

I immigrated to the United States from China as a child and grew up in Texas, New York, and Massachusetts. I attended Phillips Exeter Academy. I currently live in Durham, NC with my husband and two daughters.