Education:

Ph.D., History of Art and Architecture, Boston University, 2014. Dissertation: “Depicting the Unforgivable Sin: Images of Suicide in Medieval Art.”

M.A., History of Art, Tufts University, 2007.

B.F.A., Painting/Printmaking and Art History, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 2005 (Graduated with Distinction and with Departmental Honors in Art History).

Areas of Specialization: Late Antique, Early Christian and Byzantine Art and Architecture, Romanesque and Gothic Sculpture and Manuscript Illumination, Northern Renaissance Painting and Sculpture, Digital Humanities.

Current Professional Appointment:

Digital Projects Manager, Columbia University Libraries, Columbia University New York, November 2023 - Present:

  • Manages and oversees development and implementation of large-scale digital infrastructural projects at the library.

Previous Professional Appointment:

Digital Projects Coordinator, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, August 2018 - September 2023:

  • Led collection tagging initiative to add descriptive tags for 100,000 artworks using machine vision technology.
  • Guided museum adoption of CC0 for public domain images and data as part of revised open access policy and digital strategy.
  • Led partnership with Wikimedia Foundation and contribution of open access materials to Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata that increased global reach of collection and generated seven million monthly views.
  • Initiated the museum’s first Open Data Program and GitHub repository.
  • Created and led interdepartmental Open Access/Open Data working group.
  • Primary liaison on open access projects between several departments, including imaging services, digital experience, registrar’s office, gallery archives, and library.

Robert H. Smith Postdoctoral Research Associate for Digital Art History, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, August 2014 – August 2018

Tech Skills:

Select Languages, Libraries, and Programs: HTML, XML, JSON, CSS, Leaflet.js, vanilla JavaScript, JQuery, D3.js, Python, SQL, SPARQL, Adobe Suite, ArcGIS, MediaWiki, Git.

Select Frameworks and Standards: International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), REST APIs, GLAM Metadata Data Models.

Honors and Awards:

Selected Participant, Coding Dürer, Ludwigs-Maximilian-University, Munich, 2017.

Fellow, Kress Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art History, Middlebury College, 2014.

Edwin S. and Ruth M. White Prize, Boston University Center for the Humanities, 2013.

Angela J. and James J. Rallis Memorial Award, Boston University Center for the Humanities, 2013.

Dean’s Scholarship, Boston University, 2012 – 2013.

Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship, Boston University, 2011 – 2012.

President’s Grant, Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, 2011.

Presidential Fellowship, Boston University, 2009 – 2013.

U.S. Student Fulbright Fellowship, Uppsala University, Sweden, 2007 – 2008.

Tuition Scholarship, Tufts University, 2005 – 2007.

Art History Prize, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 2005.

Goethe Institut Stipendium für Sprach Studieren, Goethe Institut, Berlin, 2005.

Publications:

“Hyperformalism: Notes on Machine Vision and Art Historical Method,” Critical Digital Art History, ed. Anna Dahlgren and Amanda Wasielewski (Intellect Books, 2024), 146-166.

“The Hanging of Judas in Chicago and the End of An Image,” Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 42, No. 3 (2023), 179-188

“Opening Up: The National Gallery of Art’s Wikimedia Project,” Journal for Digital Media Management, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Summer 2022), 358-367.

“Reassessing the Problem of Scandinavian Romanesque,” The Regional and Transregional in Romanesque Europe, Transactions of the British Archaeological Association, ed. John McNeill and Richard Plant (Taylor and Francis, 2021), 273-285.

“Review: Lena Liepe, A Case for the Middle Ages: The Public Display of Medieval Church Art in Sweden 1847-1943.” The Medieval Review, November 2019. Available here.

“Measure, Number and Weight: Perfection in Medieval Art and Thought,” Perfection: The Essence of Art and Architecture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Lorenzo Pericolo and Elisabeth Oy-Marra (Brepols, 2019), 33-53.

“Saint Birgitta of Sweden: Movement, Place, and Visionary Experience,” Moving Women Moving Objects (400-1500), ed. Mariah Proctor-Tiffany and Tracy Chapman Hamilton (Brill, 2019), 137-159.

“Forgotten Genealogies: Brief Reflections on the History of Digital Art History” International Journal of Digital Art History, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2015), 38-49. Available here.

“A Research-Based Model for Digital Mapping and Art History: Notes from the Field,” co-author with Paul B. Jaskot, Anne Kelly Knowles, Andrew Wasserman, and Stephen Whiteman, Artl@s Bulletin, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2015): Article 5. Available here.

“Review: Åsa Ringbom, The Voice of the Åland Churches: New Light on Medieval Art, Architecture and History.” The Medieval Review, December 2014. Available here.

“Picturing the Fallen King: Royal Patronage and the Image of Saul’s Suicide,” Patronage, Power, and Agency in Medieval Art, Occasional Papers XV from the Index of Christian Art, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, 2013), 151-174.

Articles in Progress:

“AI Art as Ekphrasis, and the Limits of the Generative Imagination,” experimental essay exploring the confluence between generative AI art and the ancient rhetorical art of ekphrasis using authored AI prompts, International Journal for Digital Art History, 2025.

“An Unpublished Illuminated Manuscript of William of Auvergne’s De moribus (British Library MS. Yates Thompson 44) and its relationship to the Virtues and Vices Cycle at Notre-Dame, Paris.” (draft completed)

Book Project

Representing Suicide in Medieval Art: the first dedicated study to the iconography and historically important moments of the representation of suicide in medieval visual culture, such as the shift in representation in Late Antiquity from the heroic to the condemnable, the Romanesque sculptures of the suicide of Judas, and the return of images of suicide from Antiquity in thirteenth-century manuscript illumination.

Personal Digital Projects:

In progress:

“Mapping Medieval Gotland”: Mapping the 92 medieval churches and the Hanseatic city of Visby on the Swedish island of Gotland.

“A Visual Ethnography of the North: Olaus Magnus’ Carta Marina and The History of the Northern Peoples”: A dynamic markup of Olaus Magnus’ map of Scandinavia and the Baltic (1539) and the descriptions of selected locations on the map from his companion work The History of the Northern Peoples (1555).

One-Offs, Experiments, and Creative Coding:

Heatmap of 8.1K Romanesque buildings: A map showing the distribution of Romanesque architecture using data from Wikidata.

What Does Collecting Look Like?: A data visualization of the National Gallery of Art’s recent acquisitions.

Talks, Conference Presentations, and Invited Lectures:

Organizer and speaker, “What is the place of open knowledge communities in the development and use of AI?,” Columbia University Libraries, Open Access Week Panel, October 2024.

Invited particpant, “Computer Vision and Art History Today,” Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, June 2024.

Presentation to Wikidata and LD4 Community Group on National Gallery of Art’s Wikimedia project, April 2023.

“Everyone’s and Just Yours. Wikimedia, Audience, and Openness at the National Gallery of Art, Washington,” The Art Museum in the Digital Age, Belvedere Museum, Vienna, January 2022. Recording available here.

“Opening Up: Wikidata and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, “ ARLIS Annual Conference, Montreal, May 2021.

“Data in Context,” with Alexandra Libby, Sarah Osborne Bender, Emily Ann Francisco, and Shannon Morelli, Coding Our Collection: The National Gallery of Art Datathon, Washington, D.C., October 2019.

“Digital Art History: What it is, is not, and should be,” invited seminar, Digital Humanities Uppsala, Uppsala University, Sweden, September 2019.

“Digital Initiatives at the National Gallery, Washington,” invited speaker, Digital Transfer zwischen Forschung, Museum und Öffenlichkeit, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Germany, September 2019.

“Digital Humanities at the Art Museum,” roundtable organizer, chair, and discussant, Association for Computers and the Humanities, Pittsburgh, July 2019.

“Digital Art History at the Museum: Methods, Problems, and Possibilities,” Keynote for Ancient Itineraries, Kings College, London, September 2018.

“The (Digital) Space Between: Notes on Art History and Machine Vision Learning,” DH2018, Mexico City, Mexico, June 2018.

“Early Modern Maps of Rome: A Use Case of IIIF Implementation at the National Gallery of Art, Washington,” International Image Interoperability Framework Conference, Washington DC, May 2018.

“Studying Medieval Iconography at the Scale of Technology,” International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, May 2018.

“Reassessing the Problem of Romanesque in Scandinavia,” The Regional and Transregional in Romanesque Art and Architecture, British Archaeological Association, Poitiers, France, April 2018.

“The Persistence of Runes: Re-Use, Memory, and Material in Medieval Scandinavian Architecture,” Reuse Reconsidered, Brown University, September 2017.

“Rogue’s Gallery: The Failure of Machine Vision Learning,” with Justin Underhill and Victoria Szabo, Coding Dürer, Ludwigs-Maximilian-University, Munich, Germany, March 2017.

“The Medieval Challenge: Ambiguous Data, Historical GIS, and Deep History,” Association of American Geographers, San Francisco, March 2016.

“Visualizing “Big Data” Thinking through Best Practices and the Role of Art Historical Research Centers,” with Ellen Prokop, NORDIK 2015, Reykjavik, Iceland, May 2015.

“From Documents to Maps: New Digital Perspectives on the Early History of the Accademia di San Luca,” with Guendalina Serafinelli, From Ink and Paper to the Cloud: The European Correspondence to Jacob Burkhardt, Cortona, Italy, April 2015.

“Picturing the Fallen King: Royal Patronage and the Image of Saul’s Suicide,” Medieval Patronage, Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, October 2012.

“From Despair to Love: Picturing Suicide in Medieval Art,” Association of Art Historians’ sponsored public lecture series “Art History in the Pub,” London, England, January 2012.

“Madness and Knowledge: The Hermeneutics of Suicide in Medieval Art,” Association of Art Historians New Voices Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland, November 2011.

“Lund Cathedral and the Politics of Romanesque Architecture in Scandinavia,” 101st Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, Chicago, April 2011.

“Social Control and the Public Image in Late-Medieval Sweden: The Case of the Vapenhus,” 36th Annual Conference of the Association of Art Historians, Glasgow, Scotland, April 2010.

“Cultic Devotion and Christ’s Body in Medieval Swedish Wall Paintings,” 54th Annual Fulbright Conference, Berlin, Germany, April 2008.

“Richard Diebenkorn: Opposition and the Figure,” Against the Grain: The New American Art History, Yale University, May 2007.

“Desire and Same-Sex Sin in the Thirteenth-Century French Moralized Bible”, Queer Images, Queer Imaginings, Tufts University, April 2007.

“Ab Ex Goes West and the Return of the Figure in California, 1945-1965”, Picasso to Pollock, Tufts University, April 2007.

Research Interests:

Representations of suicide in ancient and medieval art, Romanesque and Gothic manuscript illumination, French Romanesque and Gothic sculpture, methods and historiography of art history, the medieval Baltic as a distinct artistic and cultural region, medieval Scandinavian art and architecture (Viking to Reformation), medieval intellectual history, digital humanities, digital art history, quantitative and computational analysis for art history, open GLAM standards and methods, machine vision learning.

Teaching and Education Experience:

Visiting Assistant Professor, Pratt Institute, School of Information, 2023 - Present:

  • “Audience Research and Evaluation,” Spring 2025
  • “Advanced Projects in Visualization,” Fall 2023, 2024
  • “Information Visualization,” Fall 2024

Adjunct Assistant Professor, Baruch College, City University of New York, 2024 - Present:

  • “Future of New York City,” Macaulays undergraduate honors seminar, Spring 2025
  • “People of New York,” Macaulays undergraduate honors seminar, Spring 2024

Adjunct Professor, SUNY Westchester:

  • “Art of the Modern World,” Fall 2023
  • “Art of the Ancient World,” Fall 2022

Guest Lecturer, Course on Wikidata for Cultural Heritage, Foundation for Advancement in Conservation, February 2021.

Gallery Docent, Scandinavia House, New York, April 2013 – July 2014.

Teaching Fellow, Art History II, Boston University, January – May 2011.

Teaching Fellow, Art History I, Boston University, September – December 2010.

Teaching Assistant, Picasso to Pollock, Tufts University, January – May 2007.

Teaching Assistant, Art, Ritual, and Culture, Tufts University, September – December 2006.

Education Intern and Museum Lecturer, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, May – August 2004.

Languages:

German, Swedish, French, Danish (read), Norwegian (read), Latin (read), Old English (read), Old Norse (limited reading), basic Latin paleography.

Professional Service:

Representative, Executive Committee, International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), 2022 – present.

Member, Technical Review Committee, International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), 2021 – 2022.

Paper and Session Reviewer, Digital Humanities 2020, Digital Humanities 2022, Digital Humanities 2023

Paper and Session Reviewer, Association of Computers and the Humanities 2021

Paper and Session Review, DH Unbound 2022

Manuscript Reviewer, International Journal of Digital Art History

Manuscript Reviewer, Visual Resources

Editor-at-large, Digital Humanities Now

Professional Memberships:

College Art Association

Digital Art History Society

International Center of Medieval Art

Medieval Academy of America

Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study