Adventures in Art History

I am not an Egyptologist.... but my work leads me on many explorations of the monumental, the transcendent, and the sublime in art, architecture, and human culture. This might be the pyramids of Giza, a rock concert, or the writings of Herman Melville. More often, it's the strange and dazzling world of Gothic cathedrals and related arts in MEDIEVAL EUROPE. (Photo above by Austin Andrews, Jan. 2025)

My research specialty is the art and architecture of medieval Europe, with an emphasis on the figural arts of Gothic France and Germany. My teaching encompasses the history of medieval sculpture; Gothic cathedrals in all their multimedia complexity; the body as subject and medium in medieval sources; monumental narrative arts; altarpieces and other liturgical furnishings; visions and visionary experiences; the portrayal and provocation of emotions in medieval art; and approaches to race, gender, and representation in medieval European art. I’ve designed and regularly teach a broad 100-level course called Art and Architecture of the Sacred: A Global Perspective. In spring 2026 my colleague Quincy Ngan and I will introduce a new 100-level class on The Body in Art: Asian and European Approaches.

My first book, The Gothic Screen: Sculpture, Space, and Community in French and German Cathedrals, ca. 1200-1400 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), examined the ways in which the decorated partitions inside Gothic buildings served not only to create discrete liturgical zones but also to connect lay and clerical audiences around a shared focal point. My more recent book Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture (Yale University Press, 2020), illustrated with over 300 photos that I made on site, offers new ways of looking at monumental sculptural arts in Germany and France, exploring the diverse facets of sensory, physical, and affective experience they arouse. (You’ll find more about those, including reviews, under PUBLICATIONS.) In 2016 I was honored to receive the annual prize of the Aby Warburg Foundation for contributions to the fields of art history and cultural studies.

In addition to my own scholarship, I’ve translated several seminal art-historical studies from German, most notably Aloïs Riegl’s Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts (Zone, 2004), and, more recently, Hans Jantzen’s “On Gothic Church Space.” I have been using Substack to publish other short(ish) essays and translations; I invite readers to subscribe to a free account on that page.

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