I am the Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and I teach in the Graduate Program in Art History at Williams College. I received my PhD from Princeton University, and I have taught at Johns Hopkins University and Yale University. I am specialist in the early-modern period with a focus on the materiality of prints and drawings, philosophies of conservation, the archive and its absences, the failures of global art history, and the necessity of incorporating Critical Race Theory into early modern studies.

My first book, Drawing and the Senses: An Early Modern History (Harvey Miller Series in Baroque Art, 2017), was a philosophical study of early-modern drawing pedagogy and its intersections with intellectual history. My second book, The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas (Yale University Press, 2019) examined a global history of paper from the late-medieval period in Europe to Viceregal New Spain to consider how it transformed artistic practice, memory, and the archive. My current book project examines maritime space in Dutch painting as a site of erasure, arguing that the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade both was integral to and in turn excised from seventeenth-century Dutch painting and printmaking.

My research has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Getty Research Institute, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Historians of Netherlandish Art. I also co-edit the book series Art/Work (Princeton University Press) with Ittai Weinryb, and I host the podcast In the Foreground: Conversations on Art and Writing.

If you like, follow me on Twitter @FowlerCaro where I am more likely to update on upcoming events, etc. than here, which I maintain out of some vague sense of necessity while remaining ambivalent about its maintenance as I would rather be reading and writing elsewhere.