My new book, Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and its Legacies, will be published by University of Chicago Press in January 2025. It will be the first art book to offer a synthetic account of art and US imperialism around the globe in the nineteenth century.

In the book, I explore nineteenth-century US painters’ complicity and resistance in the face of ascendant US imperialism and offer eye-opening readings of canonical paintings: landscapes of polar expeditions and tropical tourism, still lifes of imported goods, genre painting, and ethnographic portraiture. The book also tackles the legacy of US imperialism, examining Euro-American painters of the past alongside global artists of the present. Pairing each chapter with reflections on works by contemporary anticolonial artists including Maria Thereza Alves, Tavares Strachan, Nicholas Galanin, Yuki Kihara, and Carlos Martiel, I address current questions around representation, colonialism, and indigeneity.

Painting US Empire foregrounds an overlooked topic in the study of nineteenth-century US art and illuminates the ongoing ecological and economic effects of the US empire. 

Find out more and preorder your copy from University of Chicago Press.