Biography
I grew up in Romania, was educated at Harvard (AB) and Princeton (PhD), and I also spent two years studying in Berlin. After a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Tufts University, I joined the University of Chicago in 2014.
"My book, Objects in Air: Artworks and Their Outside around 1900 (U Chicago Press, 2021) won the DAAD/GSA Best Book Prize in Literature/Cultural Studies in 2022 and the Gordon J. Laing Prize in 2024 for the most distinguished contribution to the University of Chicago Press by a faculty member. The book is a literary study of art historical texts. It is about artworks that continue beyond their material confines and about air as the embodiment of their continuity. The book traces evocations of air within and without an artwork, that is, evocations that cut across the separate domains of artwork as image and artwork as material object. It draws on the history of science to examine air as the material space surrounding an artwork, its “milieu,” “surroundings,” and “environment” by looking at the linguistic efforts of Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the dance theorist and choreographer Rudolf Laban. The book contends that air, the medium of continuity par excellence, is the site of aesthetic ecologies; it is where artworks enact the permeable boundaries between art and life.