Hello, I’m Megan!

👩🏻‍🏫 I am a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Delaware, where I study Atlantic world art and material culture.

🔎 My research focuses on the materials and politics of art during the eighteenth century.

🖍 My dissertation, “Crayon Rebellion: The Material Politics of North American Pastels, 1758-1814,” investigates the role of the pastel medium in shaping revolutionary ideas and settler-colonial identities.

🏛 I am the 2025-2026 Barra Foundation Fellow in Art and Material Culture at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Previously, I was a 2024-2025 Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. Read more about my work here.

Research Interests

• medium specificity and technical art history
• drawing practice and artistic education
• politics and aesthetics in the Age of Revolutions
• art’s relationship to violence