Books & Essays

A body of work spanning five decades, from illustrated travel accounts of the Enlightenment to the neuroscience of visual attention.

Books

Symbol and Myth
1979
Symbol and Myth
Associated University Presses

Examines Humbert de Superville's essay on absolute signs in art and semiotics — an early study in the theory of visual meaning.

Voyage into Substance
1984
Voyage into Substance
MIT Press

Analyzes illustrated travel accounts from 1760–1840, tracing the interplay between art, science, and the natural world.

Body Criticism
1991
Body Criticism
MIT Press

Investigates Enlightenment imaging techniques for visualizing the unseen interior of the human body — at the intersection of art and medicine.

Artful Science
1994
Artful Science
MIT Press

Explores Enlightenment entertainment and the decline of visual education — how scientific spectacle shaped popular culture.

Good Looking
1996
Good Looking
MIT Press

Essays examining the ethical and aesthetic value of images — a defense of visual intelligence in an era of textual bias.

Visual Analogy
1999
Visual Analogy
MIT Press

Addresses consciousness as an art form — examining how visual connections and analogies constitute a form of thought.

Devices of Wonder
2001
Devices of Wonder
Getty Research Institute

Co-authored catalog for the Getty exhibition tracing wonder-inducing objects and optical technologies from early modern boxes to contemporary screens.

Echo Objects
2007
Echo Objects
University of Chicago Press

An inquiry into the cognitive work of images — how pictures function as instruments of understanding, memory, and embodied knowledge.

A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field
2011
A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field
University of Chicago Press

Bridges the humanities and neuroscience, charting shared intellectual terrain and proposing new frameworks for interdisciplinary research.

Essays & Chapters

2023
Postscript: What more can museum architecture do?
Chapter 10 in Museum Configurations

An inquiry into the spatial and sensory possibilities of museum architecture — asking what buildings can prompt, provoke, and transform in those who move through them.

2022
A Curve in the Road: Can Space Syntax Bend Towards Biourbanism?
Forthcoming essay on museum design and spatial theory

Explores the intersection of space syntax methodology and emerging theories of biourbanism in contemporary museum and urban design.

2018
The Jewel Game: Gems, Fascination and the Neuroscience of Visual Attention
Essay on neuroscience and visual culture

Explores how visual attention integrates mind, body, and the nonhuman world through the phenomenology of observing jewels.

2016
Seizing Attention: Devices and Desires
Oxford Art Journal, special issue (April 2016)
2014
From Observant Eye to Non-Attentive 'I': The Camera as Cognitive Device
Exhibition catalogue essay
Earlier
Controversial Bodies: Thoughts on the Public Display of Plastinated Corpses
Essay on Body Worlds and public reception

Examines the public responses to the Body Worlds exhibitions and the ethics of displaying human remains as spectacle.