My research broadly concerns the relationship between art and politics. I recently published my first book, Usable Pasts: Social Practice and State Formation in American Art (Brill 2022). This book addresses the mythic and material afterlives of the New Deal in order to write a new history of social practice in the United States. I analyse projects by Suzanne Lacy, Rick Lowe and Martha Rosler in relation to experimental theatre, modern dance, and photography produced within the leftist Cultural Front of the 1930s. The book’s comparative methodology allows for a multi-temporal approach to contemporary art history that avoids nostalgia, or an excessive valorisation of the present. This also relates to my other major interest in theories of history, and how these inform art history and theory.

I am also in the final stages of completing my second book, entitled What we do is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy. Written in the wake of the far-right populist turn in Europe, the US, and beyond, this book addresses aesthetic and intellectual affinities between recent art and conspiracy, proposing a theory of conspiracy that is not primarily concerned with conspiracy theory. Here, conspiracy is not used pejoratively but is instead examined as an accusation levelled at varying modes of political thought and action, from often opposing quarters, because it is seen as undermining “common sense” and reasonable behaviour. This inquiry take shape across chapters on the politics of post-internet art aesthetics; the sublime and possessive individualism in recent “critical” art; Cady Noland's security fences and silkscreens of the Symbionese Liberation Army and mutuality, secrecy and improvisation in the work of Ima Abasi Okon. Across these chapters, I explore the relationship between culture and contemporary liberalism, following on from David Lloyd's proposition that through its compensatory qualities, the aesthetic sphere naturalizes forms of life lived under the rule of property. What kind of art can work against this? Can art exist as a conspiracy capable of corroding that rule?

Other topics I have written on include an essay on usefulness in contemporary art and politics for Third Text; an essay on Mark Bradford’s work in the American Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale for the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, and I recently contributed to a roundtable on contemporary culture and neo-fascism for Third Text. I have written catalogue essays on Sam Gilliam, Alice Neel and for the exhibition "Constructing the World: Art and Economy 1919-1939." I sometimes write about non-art related matters, most recently the essay "Communist Feelings" for the New Socialist, co-authored with Hannah Proctor. I also regularly write criticism, mainly for Art Monthly.