Department of Art History

Visual and material cultures of play; enigmatology; early modern jokes and games

Book Series

Cultures of Play 1300-1700 (Amsterdam University Press).

Single-Author Books

The Shape of Difficulty: A Fan Letter to Unruly Objects (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019)

Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Selected Articles + Essays

• “Early Modern Play: Three Perspectives,” Renaissance Quarterly 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
• “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

• Fellowship in Residence, College Arts and Humanities Institute, Indiana University
• New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Grant
• New Frontiers Exploration Travel Fellowship, Indiana University
• Summer Faculty Fellowship, Indiana University
• Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies
• Samuel H. Kress Foundation Travel Fellowship
• J. William Fulbright Fellowship

• Puzzles and the Playful Academy (Intensive Freshman Seminar)
• From Van Eyck to Vermeer (A333)
• Visual and Material Cultures of Play (A483)
• Sixteenth-Century Visual Culture in Northern Europe (A482)
• Print and the Origins of the Modern Medium (A476)
• Playing with Pictures in the Fifteenth-Century Netherlands (A437)
• Art History Goes to the Movies (A490)
• Graduate Colloquium on Critical Theory and Methods in Art History (A510)
• Recent seminar topics:
  • Visual Wit
  • Netherlandish Difficulties
  • The Early Modern Thing