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Modernism, Energy, and Environment
Letters from the Field: #2 and #3
Jul 10, 2026
I write from Tampa, Florida, where last year’s back-to-back hurricanes have subsided into this year’s drought, and where I have been thinking obsessively about the university as environmental infrastructure. Like Virginia Woolf’s narrator Mary Beton in A Room of One’s Own, I have “sat down on the banks of a river” on a university campus. I’ve thought about how this place “once… was marsh too” and still would be if not for the labor of previous generations “to level, to ditch, to dig and to...
Blurring or Focusing Enslavement: Photography and The Color Black
Jul 1, 2026
In May 2025, Tamara Lanier’s court cases against Harvard University for the possession of daguerreotypes featuring her ancestors finally resulted in a settlement. These high-profile cases, which hinged on her familial claims to two photographs in Harvard’s collections, have inspired conversations around archival practices, ownership, and consent in photography. In the mid-nineteenth century, Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz had photographs taken of enslaved African Americans, including two...
Gertrude Stein in Circles: An Exhibition Review of Stein’s Life and Fandom at the George Peabody Library
Mar 18, 2026
The George Peabody Library in Baltimore, Maryland is not accessible from the street; one must traverse two anterooms before entering into that magnificent, public library. It is in one of these anterooms—a very large open room with wooden floors and tall windows open to the street—that the Gertrude Stein in Circles: Spheres of Life and Writing exhibition was held from September 22, 2024 through March 2, 2025 at Johns Hopkins University. With material drawn from archives across...
A Prayer for Mimesis? Reframing Islam in Cinema
Feb 12, 2026
In 1896, mere months after revealing their revolutionary cinematograph in Lyon, the Lumière Brothers dispatched a team of operators around the globe to showcase the new device and capture moving images for international circulation. Among this cadre of pioneering cinematographers was Alexandre Promio, who traveled to Spain, England, and Italy, before embarking on a journey to Algeria in December that same year. This broader story is part of my forthcoming book,