Writing

“Cultures on Culture: Biofilm, Conservation, and the Interface of Art and Environment”

While a 2019-20 “Art and Ecology” postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute, I wrote a brief description of my project in The Getty Magazine.

“Cigarettes, Saliva, Art: Laboratory Expertise in Florence, Italy”

In Florence, I followed artisanal and scientific restoration practices. This article focuses on seemingly trivial material traces — the monk’s cigarette and the chemist’s saliva — as embodiments of these experts’ confidence and discernment with precious historical and aesthetic artifacts. I argue that both the artisan and the scientist perform expertise by relying on sensory, craft-based familiarity with materials. Published in the Journal of Modern Craft.

“Putting Microbes to Work: Using Biotechnology to Restore Architecture & Art in Italy”

How are artworks and cultural heritage made into restoration “workspaces” for microbes? Here, I think through the implications of the multispecies work that brings microbiologists and bacteria together to clean and consolidate artifacts ranging from ancient clay terraces in Sicily to a modern stone statue in the Monumental Cemetery of Milan. Published in Thresholds.

“All the World Is Here,” Exhibition Review

My colleague, Alison Laurence, and I reviewed the exhibition, All the World Is Here: Harvard’s Peabody Museum and the Invention of American Anthropology, at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology. Published in the History of Anthropology Newsletter.