My research and teaching areas include early modern European cultural history, history and theory of museums, culinary history, and history of the book. I am most interested in relationships between objects of daily life, including the arts of the kitchen and table, and the dissemination of both learned and practical knowledge through books and prints. My recent research appears in Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy: Bartolomeo Scappi’s Paper Kitchens, (Ashgate, 2015) which focuses on the history and reception of the first illustrated cookbook in Europe, published in 1570, through print culture and book history. In 2008-9, I collaborated on the exhibition Art and Love in Renaissance Italy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 2009-10, on the exhibition Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta Van Varick at Bard Graduate Center and in 2013, on Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also at Bard Graduate Center.
“Verbal Representations of Furniture.” In A Cultural History of Furniture: The Age of Exploration, 1500-1700, edited by Christina M. Anderson, 187- 205. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
“Cooking on the Margins: Using Cookbooks,” keynote address, Eating Words, symposium, Centre for Material Texts, University of Cambridge, England, September 2011.
“Quodlibets and Fricassées: Food in Musical Settings of Street Cries in Early Modern London.” In Food Hawkers: Selling in the Streets from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Melissa Calaresu and Danielle Van den Heuvel, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016, pp. 43 – 61.
“Beyond terminology, or, the limits of “decorative arts.” Journal of Art Historiography Number 11 (December 2014).
“Marriage as a Key to Understanding the Past” and “Celebrating Betrothal, Marriage, and the Family.” In Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, ex. cat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
“The Kitchen as Exemplary Space from Renaissance Treatise to Period Room.” Studies in the Decorative Arts, Vol. XIV, No. 1 (Fall-Winter 2008-9): 20 – 34.
“Between
Legend, History and Politics: The Santa Fina Chapel in San Gimignano.” In Italian
Renaissance Cities: Cultural Translation and Artistic Exchange, edited by Stephen Campbell and Stephen Milner,
246-272. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
501 Survey of the Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture II
566 Rites of Passage: Arts of Marriage and Childbirth in the Italian Renaissance
581 Studies in Culinary History and the Decorative Arts
585 The Museum
652 City and Country in the Italian Renaissance
655 Markets to Manners: Cooking and Eating in Early Modern Europe
678 Arts and Crafts in Early Modern Europe: The Case of the Kitchen
733 The Exhibition Experience: Design and Interpretation
780 Georges Hoentschel: Collector, Designer, and Architect in Belle-Époque Paris
781 The Early Modern Book: Cookbook as Case Study
908 Artists, Craftsmen, and the Pursuit of Nature in Renaissance Europe
