I am happy to provide syllabi for these and other courses previously taught.

Colonialism, Indigeneity, Postmodernism

Advanced seminar, taught as a graduate seminar or joint grad-undergrad at the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison

This course will revisit the history of contemporary art in the Americas through the lens of settler colonialism. It takes its cue from a provocation: that settler colonialism shares certain structural similarities with the discourses and art practices identified with conceptual art, institutional critique, and postmodernism. Unlike other forms of imperialism, such as mercantile and plantation colonialism, "settler colonialism" describes a set of practices by which one population displaces another within a particular territory. An ongoing historical condition, settler colonialism is characterized by territorial expansion, historical erasure, information control, and cultural streamlining or assimilation. This course will consider to what extent similar processes can be seen in practices of artistic appropriation that gained popularity alongside postmodern discourse, or the forms spatial expansiveness taken up under the banner of postminimalism. Throughout the semester, we will study critiques of contemporary art discourse authored by Indigenous scholars and artists from the 1970s to the 1990s, when artists themselves observed similarities between settler colonial epistemes and conceptual, postminimal, and postmodern tendencies. Equally, we will examine the work of Indigenous, Native American, and First Nations artists who sought to subvert postmodernism's colonial heritage through artistic strategies like allegory and irony. Across these cases, we will develop an understanding of how settler colonialism has adapted to the contemporary era, while also gaining insight into strategies of resistance.

The Visual Culture of Indigenous Activism

Upper-level lecture course or hybrid lecture-seminar, taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (spring 2025)

This course examines how Indigenous artists, activists, culture bearers, and communities have used visual culture to assert their rights to ancestral homelands in North America, focusing on the role of art in activist movements throughout the twentieth century. Cases we will discuss include architecture built during an occupation of Alcatraz Island, a weaving produced to support a struggle over water rights, the return of sacred songs, as well as round dances, mirror shields, and a wide range of objects and symbols made within protest camps and grassroots movements. In addition to exploring key events and concepts related to Indigenous visual sovereignty from the past hundred years, students will gain an introduction to histories of art that paved the way for contemporary Land Back work.

Introduction to Indigenous Arts of North America

Undergraduate lecture course, taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison

The territories we now call North America encompass the ancestral homelands of hundreds of distinct Native American nations, whose citizens continue to live and thrive in every region of the continent. This course offers an introduction to select histories of art from these lands. From Anishinaabe quillwork to Inuit storyknife drawings, and from a Tsėhésenėstsestȯtse-language billboard in Times Square to a tent carved from Athenian marble, we will study cases from disparate regions and periods that demonstrate the diversity and vitality of Indigenous art.

The course provides an introduction to ancestral arts alongside cross-cultural practices such as video art and installation. Students will gain understanding of core theoretical concepts developed by Indigenous scholars, such as visual sovereignty, decolonization, cultural appropriation, and what David Garneau calls critical care. Not least, we will study how the discipline of art history has contributed to settler colonial practices, and examine how art has aided resistance to colonial power.

Performance in Greenlandic Contemporary Art and Critical Theory

Graduate seminar, taught at Ilisimatusarfik—The University of Greenland

This course examines topics in Greenlandic art history since 1980 through the lens of performance. In one sense, “performance” describes a set of practices that position the artist’s body, audience participation or aspects of lived experience as art. As a theoretical term, performance provides a conceptual method for analyzing how media representations, object relations, and social norms enact common values, collective memory, or forms of power. Performance has challenged the capitalist foundation of object-based art and it has facilitated action, collectivization, and self-expression in the spirit of decolonization. Performance also commodifies social interaction and potentially reproduces scenarios of social control. In all instances, performance asks us to consider how art participates in social life.

The course will expose students to core artworks and debates related to performance in Greenlandic art and cultural discourse, and to theoretical and art historical understandings of performance generally. Along the way, we will discuss how art practice intersects with customary performance genres, theater, public protest, embodied habitus, and the performative aspects of discourse. We will analyze the work of Greenlandic artists alongside related moments in Inuit, Indigenous, European, and global art history.

Decolonizing Exhibitions

Hybrid lecture-seminar, taught at the University of Copenhagen

This course provides a broad overview of postcolonial and decolonial theory by analyzing how these theoretical positions have been applied in exhibitions, curatorial interventions, and artworks. Through surveying shifts in exhibition practice throughout the twentieth century, we will study and debate core concepts at the intersection of art and colonialism, among them hybridity, the subaltern, ethno-aesthetics, land, Indigeneity, and “contact zones.” The course draws on historical and contemporary cases from a diverse range of cultural and geographic contexts in order to address questions such as: How are practices of place-based decolonization and postcolonial critique navigated in Europe, in settler colonial states like the U.S. and Canada, in former colonies and beyond? What are the consequences of memorializing colonialism and institutionalizing decolonization? How can the discourses and practices of decolonization inform one another and to what extent have they been at odds?