Articles & Essays
My writing centers the stories we tell about women artists and their creative labor—on the page, canvas, and screen.
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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
March 2026I 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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Mary Blair and the Making of Cinderella
Disney and Popular Culture: A Celebration of 100 Years of Disney
February 2026Blair’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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The Comeback of Miriam Hopkins
Comebacks: The Return of the Aging Film Star
December 2025The 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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"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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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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Feminist Film Theory: An Introductory Reading List
JSTOR Daily
September 2023Evolving from the analysis of representations of women in film, feminist film theory asks questions about identity, sexuality, and the politics of spectatorship.
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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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Feminist Art History: An Introductory Reading List
JSTOR Daily
March 2023Beginning with texts written in the 1970s, this reading list shows how the major questions, critiques, and debates developed in the field of feminist art history.
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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.