I am Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA. My teaching areas include Renaissance, Baroque, feminist art history, monographic approaches to artists (Michelangelo, Bernini) and cities (Venice), and, since 2016, museum studies. My research focuses on the patronage of art in early modern Italy, particularly patronage by women, and how patrons communicated ideas about themselves in such objects as altarpieces and portrait. A forthcoming article exploring one aspect of this is “Vittoria Colonna and a Visual Cult of Friendship.” I am also engaged in a book project examining Giorgio Vasari’s use of cities in identifying artistic genius in his Lives of the Artists (1550, 1568), “Cities in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists.”
My teaching has led me to the scholarship on pedagogy, particularly the intersection of technology and art history, and a forthcoming article on this is entitled “Planning and Developing an Online Exhibit in an Undergraduate Seminar: Collaborative Learning between Students and Faculty.” This article is based on what I have learned over the course of several years about the benefits, obstacles, and possibilities of incorporating an online exhibition into an upper-level art history seminar. I’ve developed several online exhibitions with students about the city of Venice:
Students in my ARTH 317: Laboratory in Museum Studies work on an exhibition of paintings by Margaret Sutton, a 1926 graduate of Mary Washington, Margaret Sutton: Life + Art.
Students in my Bernini seminar also worked online. For Bernini, please visit Bernini 2013.
In the spring of 2013 I had the pleasure of joining about 30 faculty at UMW involved in developing personal domains and exploring how we might use these domains within our scholarship and teaching. I am particularly interested in giving my students access to my research as it develops, and I welcome comments and questions from students, past and present. I also welcome comments from colleagues. In the course of this project I created a blog, Think Off-Center, for discussions about pedagogy and technology. More recently I have started a blog for my Museum Studies classes, The Art Museum.
