I am Distinguished University Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Medieval Art at Case Western Reserve University, where I currently serve as an interim chair of the Art History and Art Department. I write on a wide variety of subjects, from image theory to polyfunctionality of objects. My books have tackled macabre murals, manipulable devotional sculpture, and unrepresentability in illuminated manuscripts. Anthologies have addressed questions of liminality, emotion, performance, abstraction, and animation. Recent articles have explored manuscript absences and erasures, materiality & semiotics of medium, figurations of despair, sensorium & imagination, and animality in medieval Jewish art. My work has been supported by the Guggenheim, Kress, Mellon, and Franco-American Cultural Exchange Foundations as well as by the ACLS.

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Passionate about teaching, I have won both of my university's highest awards for graduate teaching and mentoring, and received a teaching award from the Medieval Academy of America. Several years ago, I launched  a series of collaborative Mellon-sponsored courses on the global Middle Ages with curators at the Cleveland Museum of Art. 

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In 2022, I was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. In the same year my book The Absent Image received the Charles Rufus Morey Award from College Art Association; in 2023, it received the Otto Gründler Prize.