She received her PhD in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. Her work explores nineteenth-century fascinations with perfection and its preservation, including artist-naturalist Titian Peale’s butterfly projects, painter Martin Johnson Heade’s hummingbird series, the collection of glass botanical models at Harvard, and the work of bodybuilder Eugen Sandow. A forthcoming article on late-nineteenth-century patents for portable magic lantern projectors and illuminated, wearable technologies will be published in Modernism/modernity.