Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American landscape painting and American western art. She received her Ph.D. from Washington University in 1989. She is the author of four books, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992; Plain Pictures: Images of the American Prairie, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996; The Majestic Grand Canyon: 150 Years in Art, First Glance Books, 1998, and most recently Wonderlands in Stone: Thomas Moran's Western Chromolithographs (forthcoming 2005 from the University Press of Kansas). It will accompany an exhibition of the same name that will open in October 2005 at Omaha's Joslyn Museum of Art. Lillian Turner