Biography
I am a historian of German cultural and intellectual life in the modern period. My research and teaching center on material culture, the history of museums, and the history of aesthetics.
My first book, The God Behind the Marble: The Fate of Art in the German Aesthetic State (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a history of German cultural politics and aesthetics during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. It tells this story through Germans’ engagement with the French looting of European art collections, a Kunstraub [‘art robbery’] that challenged the faith that art offered a powerful source of societal liberation in a period of revolutionary violence. By following conflicts over the ownership, interpretation, conservation, and exhibition of objects, the book argues that the world of arts administration at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a ground of struggle over the powerlessness of art to convey political meaning, a struggle with lasting consequences for how we understand the modern public museum of art. In addition to the monograph, two additional essays draw on this research: “The Honor of the Trophy: A Prussian Bronze in the Napoleonic Era” in The Things They Carried: War, Migration and Material Culture, ed. Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018); and “Lüdwig Völkel’s Sababurg List: An Inventory of the Public Museum of Art,” in Taking Stock: Media Inventories of the German Nineteenth Century, eds. Sean Franzel, Ilinca Iurascu, and Petra McGillen (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming).