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

• ARTH-A290 How Architecture Works
• ARTH-A333 From Van Eyck to Vermeer
• ARTH-A437 Playing with Pictures in the Fifteenth-Century Netherlands 
• ARTH-A476 Print and the Origins of the Modern Medium 
• ARTH-A482 Sixteenth-Century Visual Culture in Northern Europe
• ARTH-A483 Visual and Material Cultures of Play
• ARTH-A490 Art History Goes to the Movies 
• ARTH-A510 Graduate Colloquium on Critical Theory and Methods in Art History 
• ARTH-A638 Problems in 16th Century Art Outside Italy: Varieties and Consequences of Early Modern Visual Wit
• ARTH-A638 Problems in 16th Century Art Outside Italy: Netherlandish Difficulties 
• ARTH-A638 Problems in 16th Century Art Outside Italy: The Early Modern Thing
• COLL-S103 Puzzles and the Playful Academic