Education
Ph.D. 2007 (History of Art), Harvard University; M.A. 2000 (History of Art), University of Iowa; B.A. 1996 (Art History), University of Florida
Associate Professor of Art History
Ph.D. 2007 (History of Art), Harvard University; M.A. 2000 (History of Art), University of Iowa; B.A. 1996 (Art History), University of Florida
Art and architecture of Africa; port cities and visual cultures of the Indian Ocean world; comparative urbanism; the cultural dimension of globalization; modernity in Africa; Islamic arts of Africa; histories of photography in Africa
Senior Fellow, The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2017-2018; The National Humanities Center Fellowship, Durham, North Carolina, 2017-2018 (declined); NEH Implementation Grant for “World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean” exhibition and book project, 2016-17 (with Allyson Purpura); Mellon-funded Global Architectural History and Theory Collaborative Grant, 2015-17 (with Kenny Cupers; Clark Art Institute Residential Fellowship, Williamstown, MA, 2014-2015; Society Fellow, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, 2009-2010; Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Department of the History of Art, Johns Hopkins University, 2007-2009; Humanities Fellows Program, Stanford University, 2009-2010 (declined); Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellowship, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009-2010 (declined)
Books
Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere, Indiana University Press, 2016
World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts across the Indian Ocean, Krannert Art Museum, 2017 (co-edited with Allyson Purpura)
Articles and Chapters
“Beyond Multiple Modernities: East African Port Cities as the Space Between” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art Issue 28 (May 2020): pp. 116-125.
“The Trans-African Highway: Infrastructure Between Statehood and Selfhood” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (with Kenny Cupers) (vol 79 no. 1 March 2020): pp. 61-81.
“Subjects and Subjugation: Swahili Coast Studio Photography in Global Circulation,” MoMA’s Post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art around the Globe (March 2019) https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/1254-subjects-and-subjugation-swahili-coast-studio-photography-in-global-circulation
“The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast,” Art Bulletin 101, no. 1 (March 2019): pp. 48–69
“Toward an Itinerant Art History: The Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa” Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds Global and Local Geographies of Art, editors Michael Yonan and Stacey Sloboda (London: Bloombury, 2018): pp. 227-244
“Provocations from the Coast: Toward a Networked History of Swahili Coast Arts,” in World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts across the Indian Ocean, edited by Prita Meier and Allyson Purpura (Washington University Press, 2017): pp. 12-21 (with Allyson Purpura)
“Curators’ Notes: Swahili Arts across the Indian Ocean,” Journal18 (October2017), http://www.journal18.org/2179 (with Allyson Purpura)
“Unmoored: On Oceanic Objects in Coastal Eastern Africa, 1700-1900” Special Issue: “The Indian Ocean as Aesthetic Space” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36(3) 2017: pp. 355-67
“The Swahili House: A Historical Ethnography of Modernity,” in The Swahili World, editors Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Adria LaViolette (London: Routledge, 2017): pp. 629-641
“Stories of Stone: The Transformation and Reinvention of Swahili Coast Pillar Tombs," Dumbarton Oaks Studies of the History of Landscape Architecture, Vol. 35 (March 2016): pp.139-160
“Chinese Porcelain and Muslim Port Cities: Mercantile Materiality in Coastal East Africa,” Art History 38(4) 2015, 702-717
“Modernism in Africanist Art History: The Making of a New Discipline” in The Modernist World, edited by Allana Lindgren and Stephen Ross. Routledge Worlds, April 2015
"The Problem of Time in African Art History,” in African Art and the Shape of Time, ed. Prita Meier and Raymond Silverman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art Publications, 2012): pp. 6-17.
“Beyond Geography: Africa and Colonial Time in ‘Who Knows Tomorrow’” in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art Issue 28 (Summer 2011): pp. 68-77
“Authenticity and Its Modernist Discontents: The Colonial Encounter in African and Middle Eastern Art History,” The Arab Studies Journal Vol. XVIII no. 1 (Spring 2010): pp. 12-44
“Objects on the Edge: Swahili Coast Logics of Display,” African Arts Vol. 42 No. 4 (Winter 2009): pp. 8-23