Ruth N. Halls Professor, Art History
Director of Graduate Studies
Adjunct Faculty, Germanic Studies
Affiliate Faculty, Cultural Studies Program
Affiliate Faculty, Gender Studies
the history and theories of play; visual jokes and games, especially in northern European art of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries; enigmatology
Cultures of Play 1300-1700 (Amsterdam University Press).
The Shape of Difficulty: A Fan Letter to Unruly Objects (Penn State University Press, 2019).
Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
“Early Modern Play: Three Perspectives,” solicited by Renaissance Quarterly for 71:3 (autumn 2018), 1036-1046.
“Better Living Through Misinterpretation,” in Debra Cashion, Henry Luttikhuizen, and Ashley West, eds. The Primacy of the Image: Essays in Honor of Larry Silver (Brill, 2017), 90-102.
With Karen Inouye (American Studies, Indiana University Bloomington), “Visual Games and the Unseeing of Race in the Late Nineteenth Century,” American Quarterly 68:2 (June 2016), 287-313.
“Visual Difficulty as a Cultural System,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 65/66 (2014/2015), 332-347.
“Jan van Hemessen’s Anatomy of Parody,” in Walter S. Melion, Bret Rothstein, and Michel Weemans, eds. The Anthropomorphic Lens. Anthropomorphism, Microcosmism and Analogy during the Early Modern Period (Brill, 2014), 457-479.
“On Empathy as a Type of Early Netherlandish Visual Wit,” in Walter S. Melion, James Clifton, and Michel Weemans, eds. Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400-1600 (Brill, 2014), 189-209.
“Making Trouble: Strange Wooden Objects and the Pursuit of Difficulty ca. 1596,” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 13:1 (2013), 96-129.
“Beer and Loafing in Antwerp,” Art History 35:5 (2012), 886-907.
The College of Arts