About

PhD with distinction, Columbia University (2011)

MA, University of York (2004)

BA, Brown University (2003)

Associate Professor of Medieval Art and Architecture in the Department of the History of Art & Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

For the 2026-2027 academic year I will be the W. Ford Schumann Distinguished Visiting Professor in Democratic Studies at Williams College.

My research is largely concerned with premodern notions of authorship and authority, media theory, book history, reproduction, and the aesthetics and material culture of politics. My longstanding interests in premodern media theory have led me to expand my work beyond the medieval world to focus on the relationship between modern technology--from photography to artificial intelligence--and the history of art. My writing on AI has appeared in both public and academic venues, including Public Books, Artforum, The International Journal for Digital Art History, The Conversation, Art in America, and Art News.

My second monograph, Impressive Politics: Print before the Press in Late Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming) considers the impact of print before the alleged revolution set in motion by Gutenberg's press, offering a challenge to teleological arguments about print as a steppingstone toward political modernity. The book is grounded in two questions that, when put into conversation, mutually illuminate one another: the first is why four classes of replicable objects—coins, badges, seals, and heraldic insignia—took on a heightened prominence in late medieval England's political conflicts. The second was why, during this same period, the word "print" and the concept of impression featured so conspicuously in political discourse. In answering these questions, this book issues a fundamental revision to the way that we understand the category of “print” itself: not as a technology bound to the so-called printing revolution but instead as a process that engenders thought about representation, value, and trust.

My first book, The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403-1476 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) presents the first major art historical study dedicated to the emergence of the Middle English literary canon as an illustrated corpus. It was awarded High Commendation for Exemplary Scholarship by the Historians of British Art and received subventions from the College Art Association, the International Center of Medieval Art, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

CURRENT RESEARCH

I am currently at work on two books: the first, Extracting the Past: How the AI Industry Steals History to Rob Our Future offers the first account of artificial intelligence's reliance for its development upon historical artifacts, the labor of historians, and a perverse recounting of history itself. The second monograph, tentatively titled, Book History Is Not the History of the Book: Four Essays from Fifteenth-Century England, draws on over two decades of experience examining the manuscripts and early printed books of this period, challenging the traditional, linear formulas that have structured the field of book history: from orality to literacy, from roll to codex, from manuscript to print, and from print to digital.

PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP

I have also written public scholarship for a number of venues including Art in America, ArtNews, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Hyperallergic here and here, BitchMedia, and The Conversation. You can catch me discussing my current research on the National Humanities Center’s Discovery and Inspiration Podcast series here, or on BBC Radio 4, discussing the internet’s favorite medieval topic: marginalia. 

CONTACT

You can find my contact information on my faculty page here.

Grants & AWARDS

I have received generous support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the British Academy, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Huntington Library, the Warburg Institute, CASVA at the National Gallery of Art, the Whiting Foundation, the Medieval Academy of America, the Association for Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the American Trust for the British Library, among others.

In 2019 I was awarded the Medieval Academy of America’s CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching as well as a College Outstanding Teaching Award from UMass Amherst.