Prior to living here, I lived in New York City for about 11 years, and originally I’m from Maryland. I grew up in a really small town, not very exciting, so as soon as I could, I got away to New York.

As a visiting professor, what school are you affiliated with?

At the moment I’m not [affiliated]. Prior to being here I actually was in the Drawing and Prints department at the Morgan Library in New York. I always liked teaching and I always wanted to do it. Museum jobs are just the ones I ended up getting, so I kind of balanced the two.

What classes are you teaching this semester?

[One class] is about the Italian Renaissance. [The other is] “The Arts of Islamic Spain,” which I’m the most excited about because it’s entirely new for me. My specialty is Renaissance and Baroque era, [and] I did Islamic art as my minor in graduate school so I knew it from that angle, but it’s medieval Spain so I didn’t know much about that, so I was really excited to branch out in a new direction. I was going to Spain anyway and nobody teaches Islamic art here so I thought, “Why not?” and brought it together. Spain’s great. It’s so shameful; I had never been till this past month.

Did you go to the [Museo del] Prado?

Yea, and that is a huge repository of 16th and 17th century painting. I just felt like an idiot going there, because I was saying I was a specialist in this and I had never actually seen any of it.

Are you an artist yourself?

I [am not]. I’m actually categorically terrible at it. I always think of myself as more of a historian and we use art as the documents that we study history through.

So what do you think of Amherst?

Well, the town I like a lot because I was kind of burning out on New York. It’s a great city to be in when you’re young or if you have a lot of money. So when I stopped being so young and still didn’t have money, it wasn’t so much fun. But the College is great and I like small college environments. The students have been fantastic. I think the fact that they can take any classes they want means that you usually get people who really want to be in your class.

As a visiting professor, what kind of perspective do you bring that might be different to what is already here?

Because I worked in the museum world, I can bring a new way of looking at objects that perhaps that people who have always taught [don’t] — not that it’s an inferior way, but just a different way — they see it as a historical document that they think about in terms of scholarship. They’ve been teaching from reproductions for a very long time. One of the things I did last semester was I taught the survey of Western art and we met in the Mead Art Museum every week. We thought of [the art] as three-dimensional objects rather than a picture on a wall. So having worked in museums, I can bring to the course the point of view of “What is a museum and this culture of display and maintenance that we as a society think is very important?”