From 2005 to 2011, while at the Victoria and Albert Museum, I was co-leader of the V&A/RCA Course in the History of Design, a program that has taken a leading role in shaping scholarship about material culture. Previous to that I was Curator at the Chipstone Foundation, a progressive and experimental organization based in Milwaukee. These two positions were ideal platforms to publish and curate in the field of design history.

Among the exhibitions I curated at Chipstone – which are archived by the Foundation online - were Skin Deep: Three Masters of American Inlay, and Tea Table Coffee Table. I also contributed to the Foundation’s journals, American Furniture and Ceramics in America.

Among my other publications on historical design are Global Design History (2011), co-edited with Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley; Surface Tensions: Surface, Meaning and the Finish of Objects (2013), co-edited with Victoria Kelley; and ‘When Art History Meets Design History,’ a special issue of the RIHA Journal (2015), co-edited with Anne Puetz. I’ve also contributed essays on subjects like the “missing footstool” in eighteenth-century Britain, the parallel development of cabinetmaking and collection-based knowledge, and the role of indexicality in the Baroque.