Books and Edited Volumes

The Art of Hellenistic Queenship: Bodies of Power

Cambridge University Press, Under Contract

The Art of Hellenistic Queenship: Bodies of Power is the first study to examine the visual and material cultures of Hellenistic queens, conceived broadly as royal and dynastic women who served as subjects and patrons of art. Moving across the interconnected eastern Mediterranean and western Asia from the fourth to second centuries BCE, the book argues that the arts of queenship were central to expressions of dynastic (and sometimes even imperial) consolidation, continuity, and legitimacy. Moreover, these artworks constructed various qualities for the feminine category of “queen.” The monograph inaugurates new methods for comparing and interpreting visual articulations of queenship and ideal femininity from distinct yet culturally entangled contexts.

Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

Timescales is a collection of artworks alongside personal and academic essays that grapple with ecological time during a moment of profound historical, planetary, and cultural changes.

In 2016, Antarctica’s Totten Glacier, formed some 34 million years ago, detached from its bedrock, melted from the bottom by warming ocean waters. This event captures the disjunctive temporalities of our era’s—the Anthropocene’s—ecological crises: the rapid and accelerating degradation of our planet’s life-supporting environment established slowly over millennia. Representing and responding to these crises (i.e., climate change, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, species extinction, and biodiversity loss) require reframing time itself, making more visible the relationship between past, present, and future, and between a human life span and the planet’s.

Artists come together with scholars in the sciences and humanities to forge new intellectual spaces. Together they explore the relationship between geological deep time and historical particularity, between ecological crises and cultural expression, between environmental policy and social constructions, between restoration ecology and future imaginaries, and between constructive pessimism and radical (and actionable) hope. 

Featured artworks and artists include Pig Iron Theatre Company’s Period of Animate Existence (2017), Mary Mattingly’s WetLand (2014-2017), and Beatriz Cortez’s speculative sculptural installations.

Co-edited with Carolyn Fornoff and Bethany Wiggin.

The National Monument Audit

Monument Lab in partnership with The Mellon Foundation, 2021

(Co-editor and co-author)

The National Monument Audit assesses the current monument landscape across the United States. Monument Lab’s research team spent a year scouring almost a half million records of historic properties created and maintained by federal, state, local, tribal, institutional, and publicly assembled sources. For our deepest investigations, we focused on a study set of approximately 50,000 conventional monuments representing data collected from every US state and territory. The National Monument Audit allows us to better understand the dynamics and trends that have shaped our monument landscape, to pose questions about common knowledge about monuments, and to debunk falsehoods and misperceptions within public memory.

Shaping the Past

Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2024

Shaping the Past addresses pressing issues around what, who, and how to remember in public spaces. The book features artists, curators, and activists who critically reimagine monuments toward racial and gendered justice.

The artworks and essays offer innovative models for how we might memorialize the past, create dialogue, and strengthen democracy through public spaces across the globe. 

Co-edited with Paul M. Farber.

Queens in Antiquity and the Present: Speculative Visions and Critical Histories

Bloomsbury, In press

Queens in Antiquity and the Present: Speculative Visions and Critical Histories is an interdisciplinary edited volume that explores the notion of queenship as it has manifest from antiquity to the present, in contexts ranging from political acts to art production. Featuring the work of scholars, educators, curators, and artists, this book gathers temporally and geographically distinct ideas about queenship into a single discursive space. Invigorating the conversation around powerful historical women and their legacies, the contributors discuss ‘queenship’ as a concept with contemporary urgency—from North America to Africa, Europe to Asia—foregrounding critical methodologies and creative interventions that address the gaps within archives and current cultural and socio-political representation.

Co-edited with Anastasia Tchaplyghine

Articles and Essays

“Female Bodies and Dynastic Legitimacy in the Nereid Monument at Xanthos.” Anatolian Studies Vol. 74 (2024): 1-26.

“Monumental Presence and Absence: Approaching the Material Traces of Historical Women in the Classical World.” In Believing Ancient Women: Feminist Epistemologies for Greece and Rome, eds. Mary Gilbert, Megan Bowen, and Gwen L. Weiberg. Edinburgh Intersectionality in Classical Antiquity Series, 2023, pp. 102-20.

“Postcolonial Feminisms and Colonial Encounters in the Hellenistic Period.” In The Routledge Handbook to Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Katherine Blouin and Ben Akrigg. Routledge. Forthcoming.

“Race, Gender, and Queenship in Book Two of Vitruvius’ De Architectura.” in Arethusa vol. 55, no. 1 (2022): 19-54.

“To Decolonize a Monument” in Shaping the Past, eds. P. Farber and P.E. Kim. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2024.

“Memorials to COVID-19 Must Hold Space for Grief and Accountability” with Paul M. Farber. Monument Lab Bulletin. March 1.

“Monument (an acrostic).” Art Papers 44.02. “Monumental Interventions,” Fall/Winter 2020.

“Carceral Heritage and the Gendered Politics of Display in Caria (4th century BCE) and Korea (Present).” Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association Vol. 31 (July 2020): 136-45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/apaa.12133.