I just finished my second book, Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies. It will be the first synthetic treatment of nineteenth-century US art and empire in the global context. The project offers revisionist readings of globally-themed paintings including landscapes of polar expedition, scenes of tropical tourism, still lifes of imported goods, and ethnographic portraiture. This book aims to connect historic US paintings to the flows of commodities and peoples through colonial systems and infrastructures in the decades leading up to the formal colonization of island territories by the United States in 1898. 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 January 2025.

In winter 2024, I was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, where I will begin a new project on time and the ecological archive. This project explores the ways in which US artists of the nineteenth century accounted for varying concepts of time, from deep time to Indigenous temporality to technological and industrial time in their representations of and material engagements with the earth. Some topics I am now researching include printmaking and geological science, arboreal lives in charcoal drawing, and the light year in astronomical photographs.