As an anthropologist and Ethiopianist, I strive to make undervalued traditions meaningfully accessible to both academic and general audiences. In 2009, I co-edited the first issue of African Arts dedicated to Ethiopian art and performance. That issue epitomized my philosophy and approach to research. It was the product of collaborative work, involving a team of scholars and graduate students from multiple disciplines and countries; and it analyzed both canonical and non-canonical forms of artistic production as worthy of serious study. In addition to organizing and editing the issue with Dr. Peri Klemm, with whom I co-authored its introduction, my contribution, “Fighting HIV with Juggling Clubs: An Introduction to Ethiopia’s Circuses,” was the first comprehensive scholarly article published on this topic.

My most recent article for African Arts, “Visualizing Marriage in Northern Ethiopia: The Production and Consumption of Gama,” examines Ethiopian wedding paintings, an indigenous tradition little known outside the major tourist destination of Aksum. I argue that gama remain of critical importance to the identities of the city’s Christians, even as commercial photography has become a less expensive form of commemorating weddings. One of my current research projects also focuses on Aksum, specifically on how the repatriation and erection of a 4th-century CE monumental stele, looted by Mussolini in 1937, sparked debates about identity and cultural heritage. This project considers how the stele’s 2008 re-erection transformed visual representations of the city and its stelae field, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

A second ongoing project is my multi-year study of Ethiopian social education billboards. In 2000, I began an archive of images documenting these billboards, captivated by the imagery used to convey didactic messages. I am interested in the ways in which the mass culture of billboards is used to promote the agendas of Ethiopia’s regional state and federal governments, as well as international NGOs. I explore the history of these billboards to consider how the social issues they address have evolved to resonate with the country’s multi-ethnic, multi-faith, and multilingual population. Due to my commitment to the digital humanities, I am creating an online map to track the location of extant and destroyed billboards.

Closer to home in Norton, I devote much of my time to intense collaboration with students, through hands-on course-based projects and sustained collections-based research. In 2009, Kayla Malouin-Fletcher, Class of 2010, and I co-authored a conference paper entitled, “Collecting Art, Creating A Legacy: A History of the Wheaton College Permanent Collection.” This project made clear to me the global scope of our collection’s history and the opportunities for further research, both of which continue to be a source of intellectual stimulation.

My desire to learn more about Wheaton’s collection and to engage students directly in object-based research prompted several curatorial projects, including five student-curated exhibitions for Wheaton’s Beard & Weil Galleries. What is now known as The Provenance Project was originally featured in a co-authored article “Digital Projects and the First Year Seminar: Making Blended Learning Work at a Small Liberal Arts College” (2014) and led to a 2018 exhibition at the Attleboro Arts Museum. I am co-authoring a study exploring the provenance of the college’s William Merritt Chase portrait of Lilian Westcott Hale (c. 1907). A second, in-process article analyzes 61 unattributed satirical cartoons depicting Scottish and English subjects. Through archival and genealogical research, as well as iconographic analysis of their depictions of British material culture, I identified the artist and her biography, traced the collection’s provenance, and securely dated it to the 1930s.