Teaching Experience
I want every one of my students to walk away from my class more visually literate than they were when they began and to have a desire to be a life-long learner in a world filled with beautiful and thought-provoking works. With their inherent goodness and intelligence, BYU students are in a perfect position to live up to both.
As a byproduct of my desire to reach out to all of my students, I was awarded the Faculty Award for Distinguished Contributions to Accessibility by BYU in 2019.
Research
My research areas include: Nineteenth and twentieth-century American photography; documentary photography (including that of the Farm Security Administration); landscape photography; imagery of the American West; Mormon and Utah Art; and imagery of the European Grand Tour.
Selected Publications
In A Rugged Land: Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange’s Three Mormon Towns Collaboration, 1953-1954 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018). *Recipient of six awards.
Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Photography (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, in association with the Charles M. Russell Center Series on Art and Photography of the American West [Volume 18], 2015).
“New Cartographics: Photography and the Artistic Mapping of the American West, 1969-1979.” In “The Cartographic Imagination: Art, Literature and Mapping In Postwar America,” edited by Monica Manolescu and Will Norman. European Journal of American Culture 39, no. 1 (March 2020): 83-104.
“A Strategy of Truth: Andreas Feininger and the Creation of Propaganda for the Office of War Information (OWI), 1942.” History of Photography 43, no. 1 (2019): 84-109.
“Bound for the Fair: Chief Joseph, Quanah Parker, and Geronimo and the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904.” American Indian Quarterly 43, no. 4 (Fall 2019): 439-470.
“The Frontier in Paris: Artists from the American West in the French Capitol, 1890-1900.” TransAtlantica: Revue d’Études Américaines/American Studies Journal 2: 2017 (Summer 2019). https://journals.openedition.org /transatlantica/10747
“Reflections in the Water: An Exploration of the Uses of C.R. Savage’s 1875 Photograph of the Mass Shivwit Baptism,” Journal of Mormon History 43, no. 3 (July, 2017): 96-121. * Recipient of the LeRoy S. Axland Best Utah History Article Award, Utah Historical Society, 2018.
“Maynard Dixon and the Forgotten Man,” in Locating American Art, Finding Art’s Meaning in Museums Colonial Period to Present, ed. Cynthia Fowler (Brookline, VT: Ashgate, 2016), 139-152.
“Focusing on the Migrant: The Contextualization of Dorothea Lange’s Photographs of the John Steinbeck Committee, 1938,” in Ambivalent American: The Political Companion to John Steinbeck, eds. Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh and Simon Stow (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 191-226.
“Passing Through: Arthur Rothstein’s Photographic Account of Utah, March 1940” Utah Historical Quarterly 74 no. 1 (Winter 2006): 66-79.
“Dorothea Lange’s Portrait of Utah’s Great Depression,” Utah Historical Quarterly 70 no.1 (Winter 2002): 39-62. * Recipient of the Morris S. Rosenblatt Award for Best General Interest Article, Utah Historical Society.
Service
Being a good citizen is very important to me and I do my best to live up to the various assignments I’m given and to be a solid, reliable, and collegial colleague in my section, department, college, and across the university.
Citizenship assignments
Art History Section Head (2014-present)
College of Humanities Art Committee Chair (2019-present)
Various Search Committees.
Faith in Works Committee Chair (College of Fine Arts) (2008-2014)
Utah Historical Quarterly Board Member (2020-present)