Writing About the Arts
As part of my larger mission to explore creativity in all its forms, I write about literature, the visual arts, & the stories we tell about women artists.
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Blood and Soap: Kenneth Anger, Karina Longworth, and the Women of Hollywood Babylon
Women in Hollywood's Dream Factory: Tales of Inequality, Abuse and Resistance
ForthcomingI explore the impact of Anger’s work on the construction of an Old Hollywood mythos predicated upon the gore and glamour of women’s suffering. I model how to critically read Hollywood Babylon’s rhetorics of violence. Additionally, I consider as a response to Hollywood Babylon Karina Longworth’s podcast You Must Remember This (2014-present), a revisionist history that invites public (re)access to Hollywood history while providing tools for the critical interrogation of its gossip.
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The Comeback of Miriam Hopkins
Comebacks: The Return of the Aging Film Star
ForthcomingThe commercial failures of The Comeback (variously known as Hollywood Horror House and Savage Intruder), do not negate its important status as Hopkins’ final feature film, one that self-consciously centralizes a sixty-seven-year-old Hopkins’ ability to perform the true-to-life role of an aged and reclusive actor.
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Mary Blair and the Making of Cinderella
'The Story of ‘Once Upon a Time’: A Celebration of 100 Years of Disney
ForthcomingBlair’s concept art for Cinderella provides a clear case study for understanding her creative process, as well as her position as an artist worth celebrating.
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"This is a true story": Women Artists and Narratives of Disability in Ida Lupino’s Never Fear
Shaping Global Cultures Through Screenwriting: Women Who Write Our Worlds
September 2025This essay considers Lupino’s evocative Never Fear (1950) as a meditation not just on the polio epidemic and the fear it inspired in the public but also on the ways in which such a disease could disrupt, delay, and even paralyze the lives of working women, particularly women artists.
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Barbie: The Doll, the Icon, and the Hollywood Star
The Barbie Phenomenon, Volume 2: Icon, Brand, Celebrity and Fandom
September 2025This essay underscores how celebrity Barbies act as cultural artifacts, commodifying the legacies of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor while creating access points for new generations to engage with Old Hollywood.
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Masterpiece Story: Zeuxis Selecting Models for Helen of Troy by Angelica Kauffman
Daily Art Magazine
November 2024We’re all Angelicamad here! To celebrate the history painter extraordinaire Angelica Kauffman, I discuss her take on one of antiquity’s juiciest art stories: Zeuxis’s attempt to paint the most beautiful woman of ancient Greek myth.
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Examining the Legacy of Disney Artist Mary Blair
Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media
July 2024While this article contextualises Blair’s artistic development and her contributions to various Disney projects, I primarily interrogate how Blair’s career and legacy have been narrativised, particularly in the decades following her death, by Disney-sanctioned writers and for readers of all ages. This paper invites us to consider why Mary Blair, more than any other woman active at Disney during the mid-twentieth century, has achieved more fame and fan recognition since her death than she did in life. The answer, I argue, lies in how Blair is positioned in writing.
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Monster Mash: Universal Pictures and the Frankenstein Film Adaptations
Critical Insights: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus
March 2024A crash course on film adaptation and Universal horror written for high school and undergraduate students.
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Frida: Creativity, Trauma, & the Woman Artist
A Critical Companion to Julie Taymor
December 2023This essay considers art and creativity as forces for healing and self-expression following moments of intense personal and physical trauma as reflected in Taymor’s film and in its reception post #MeToo.
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The Miscarriage of Frida Kahlo
Nursing Clio
December 2023What the film and its dramatization of Kahlo’s pregnancy loss ultimately reveals is that we have made-- and continue to make-- Frida Kahlo’s body our business.
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Elizabeth Taylor
Senses of Cinema
November 2023Not unlike her contemporary Marilyn Monroe, it sometimes seems like Elizabeth Taylor’s multifacetedness transcends the capabilities of life writing: how are we to reduce women so iconic, so visually ubiqitous, into words?
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Mary Blair & Kate Greenaway
The Literary Encyclopedia
July 2023I contributed two biographical essays to The Literary Encyclopedia in response to a call for entries on authors and illustrators of children's books. My entry on Disney concept artist and Little Golden Books illustrator Mary Blair is part of my ongoing scholarship on the artist. My entry on Greenaway reflects my interest in Victorian women artists and illustrators.
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Wyler's Wuthering Heights: Genre, Transnationalism, and the Adaptation of the Victorian Novel
Refocus: The Films of William Wyler
March 2023I discuss William Wyler’s approach to adapting the classic Victorian novel, including wht drew Wyler to Brontë’s fictional realm in the first place, as well as the generic consequences of this transnational film adaptation.
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To Ride Into 'Paradise': Lana Del Rey's EP at 10
PopMatters
December 2022What’s most striking about Lana Del Rey’s Paradise EP and its music videos are the ways they cement her transgressive and hallucinatory aesthetic.
Imperialized Antiquities: Victorian Encounters with the Ancient Near East in the British Museum
My doctoral dissertation, defended in 2022, examines the relationship between Victorian Britain and the Ancient Near East as produced and mediated through the British Museum. I consider how the encyclopedic museum narrativized antiquity for consumption by British spectators in an imperial context. This project unveils the layers of narrative that inform and are informed by the discovery, acquisition, and reception of artifacts from Ancient Lycia and Assyria. These narratives ultimately reveal the relationship between British imperial archaeology and the museum space. In addition, I showcase how these institutional practices and spaces illuminated Victorian Britain’s place within the Great Chain of Empires initiated by their Assyrian predecessors.
I used this opportunity to pursue a project related to the Victorian
reception of antiquity, working to fulfill a lifelong curiosity about how we, centuries later, have continued to engage with and react to the mythologies and material remains of the past. These questions have been a persistent presence at my writing desk and in my classroom, applicable to antiquity just as much as they are to Hollywood and stars of the art world, ranging from Artemisia Gentileschi to Frida Kahlo.