About me
Although I work with art of all periods and media, my main expertise is in European and American works on paper from the nineteenth century to the present, and especially in the history of photography. I am currently Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum.
I received my Ph.D. in art history from Cambridge University, where I am a member of Darwin College, a graduate college in central Cambridge on the banks of the beautiful River Cam. I went to Cambridge after study at Williams College (B.A.) and Stanford University (M.A.). I attended high school in Hong Kong, where I lived for a number of years, and I also studied briefly at the University of Hong Kong.
My first professional job was as Lecturer in Art at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, where I taught for about a year and a half. I later became Curatorial Assistant at the Stanford University Museum of Art (now called the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford), and in 2001 I became Assistant Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Saint Louis Art Museum. I also spent about two years as an intern in the Department of Prints, Drawings, Paintings and Photographs at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and worked part-time as Assistant Archivist in the photograph and manuscript collections of the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge.
In 2001 I was named a short-term fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, and from 2007-8 I was the Lisette Model and Joseph G. Blum Fellow in History of Photography at the National Gallery of Canada, where I worked on a project exploring the history of focus. I have also written occasionally for London's Art Newspaper.