I specialise in late twentieth-century American art and visual culture, and my research focuses particularly on the history of American settlement; masculine identity; whiteness; the ecology and infrastructure of the twentieth-century West; cultural (de)territorialization; queer art, and image studies.
My doctoral research examines how the visual history of the American West was received and remediated in the late twentieth century, with a focus on the period between the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
My dissertation assesses how the transcontinental pursuit of a westward frontier – a mission of settlement claimed at the beginning of the twentieth century to have ‘furnished the forces dominating American character’ – continued to influence the production, reception and ‘character’ of 1990s American art and media ecology.
By staging a conversation between the work of artists including (but not limited to) David Wojnarowicz, Mike Kelley, Catherine Opie, Paul McCarthy, Miles Coolidge, and Larry Sultan, my doctoral dissertation will seek to understand how the mythic narrative of America’s ‘westward progress’ was recalled, reformed, and recirculated at the end of the twentieth century, and to what end.
My PhD is being co-supervised by Dr Lucy Bradnock and Dr Johanna Gosse.
I completed both my BA [2024] and MA [2025] in History of Art at The Â鶹ÊÓƵ.
