I research and write about art museums in the contemporary global context. I received a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from George Mason University, an M.A. in Liberal Studies from The New School for Social Research, and a B.A. in Philosophy and B.F.A. in Art History from The University of Texas.

My research is situated within the fields of Cultural Studies, Museum Studies, and the Sociology of Art, ‎specializing in the globalization of art and art museums, art theory and art historiography, and identity in relation to objects and displays of cultural heritage in postcolonial societies. I believe that art, heritage, and cultural institutions are best understood when they are ‎radically historicized and embedded within networks of power relations, past and present.

My dissertation on ‎the contested legitimacy of art museums in the Arabian Peninsula reflects this perspective. It locates the establishment of art museums in Qatar and the U.A.E. within the context of an intensely conflicted art world where the notion of art as a privileged cultural category, which has been traditionally axiomatic to the field, has been challenged but not fully unsettled. It shows how the counterintuitive forms that 21st-century Arabian Peninsula art museums take and their ambivalent reception in Western media demonstrate that the contemporary art world remains structured to exclude, in spite of how desires for the diversification or globalization of art and presumptions about the universal value of art remain motivating ideals within the art world. It argues that art museums in Qatar and the U.A.E. fully embody the institutional contradictions of a recursively defined social world.

(Photo: Yeeun Lee)