Mobile Things

I am interested in the mobility of objects and their shifting meanings as they circle the globe. What stories do they tell? How do their meanings and values change? And how can museums better communicate these layered histories?

My work in this area has been supported by the Bard Graduate Center in New York City, where I was a Visiting Fellow in the spring of 2018. There I investigated strategies for re-activating once peripatetic collection objects, attending to objects that spanned the Mediterranean, literally or conceptually, in the early modern period.

A related project, carried out in the collection of the Walters Art Museum through a 2009 course a Johns Hopkins University, resulted in an on-line tour of select Walters' objects, titled Art on the Move. I discuss this project in more detail in the Archive Journal; it has also been featured by the  Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities.

My 2018 article in Art History investigates historical attitudes toward mobility in the context of sixteenth-century Venice, with particular attention to objects imported from the eastern Mediterranean.