I’m Betty & I’m an art & design historian of Central Asia, Iran, & the Steppe. My current research revolves around premodern design systems that facilitated cross-cultural communication & the modern lives of ancient objects. My dissertation-turned-first book project, Fashioning Central Eurasia, explores how dress & fashion shaped social interactions & intertwined communities stretching from the Caucasus Mountains to the Tarim Basin in the age of the Great Silk Roads. My second major project, Eurasian Silver, is an online catalog for 3rd- to 13th-century CE silver vessels discovered in hoards across the vast Eurasian continent.

Education & Research Institutions

I received my PhD from the Department of the History of Art at Cornell University in 2020 for a doctoral dissertation entitled, “The Age of the Polychrome Kaftan: Sartorial Systems of Central Eurasia (400-900 CE).” I received an MA with distinction from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (2013), & a BA in Art History & a BFA in Fine Arts from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, & Planning, University of Cincinnati (2011).

From September 2017 through August 2019, I was the Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Before arriving at The Met, I began working on my dissertation in Saint Petersburg, Russia, at the Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences & worked with the collections at the State Hermitage Museum (2016-17). In 2014-2015 I was a DAAD Visiting PhD Student at the Seminar für Orientalische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in Germany.

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