I am an Associate Professor Emerita in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I taught from 2000-2017. During 2018-2019, I was awarded a NEH-Mellon Digital Publication Fellowship, received a Getty Research Institution Residential fellowship (on the theme of Monumentality), and held a Smithsonian Institution Senior Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. From 2020-2025, I served as a Visiting Associate Professor in Africana Studies at Brown University.
For the past fifteen years, my scholarship and teaching have focused on monuments, history and remembrance, and public space. I have written numerous articles on public monuments in the United States including essays on the Harriet Tubman/William Garrett monument in Wilmington, Delaware; the Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia; and the Four Continents statues on the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in New York City. I am also the author of two monographs: Keith Morrison, volume 5 of The David C. Driskell Series of African American Art (Pomegranate Books, 2005) and Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller (University of California Press, 2011; 2021 paperback).
Currently, I am completing the third iteration of the digital repository Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past. The Omeka site includes 134 monuments located in West Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, Mexico, Europe, and the United States. I was fortunate to refine my project with the assistance of Khanh Vo, Ph.D., Digital Humanities Specialist at the Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University Library. From 2024-2026, Khahn supported Contemporary Monuments of the Slave Past through a series of focus groups, revisions to the site, and archiving the Omeka digital repository for the Brown Digital Repository. A fourth iteration will include 80 additional monuments and memorials from the Caribbean and South America.
In spring of 2025, the City of Providence’s Department of Art, Culture and Tourism (ACT) and the Rhode Island Historical Society hired me to conduct an inventory of the city’s monuments and memorials. To accompany the inventory, I researched each commemorative work and created a digital archive of historic articles from the Providence Journal. In December 2025, I wrapped up the Providence Commemorative Works inventory project, collaborating with the photographer and Providence College professor, Eric Sung. I wrote a report of my findings that can be found on the ACT website.
At heart, I am an educator and discovered the energy of the classroom in 1996 when I served as a teaching assistant for Professor Josephine Wither's "Introduction to Art" survey course. I have appreciated my long career as a professor, teaching art history through the practice of seeing, analysis, and interpretation. With content ranging from U.S. colonial portraits to Mende sowëi helmet masks to the Statue of Liberty, my approach is to place the object at the center of our discussions and then to weave history, analysis, and interpretations together. For me, scholarship, writing, and teaching are inextricably linked.
August 8, 2026