Amelia's research asks: What if we treated trees as equally important to human figures in painting? Her dissertation “Trees as Bodies of Communication: The Arboreal Aesthetic in French Painting, 1780-1870” draws on artistic theory, environmental history, and scientific knowledge to reveal how tree and human bodies create critical narratives. This dissertation has three aims: 1) Expand understanding of eighteenth-century artistic theories of bodily communication to include the expressive tree and elucidate the roles of the communicative tree body in history and landscape painting in France from David to Degas; 2) Craft an art historical ecocritical methodology that supposes that plants can be consequential narrative actors; 3) Reveal how French academic painting charts discourses of plant agency and nature-culture relationships.

Broadly, Amelia’s interests encompass eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art; ecological and environmental issues; modern and contemporary art; and the histories of science and gardens.

Amelia was a 2025-2026 Residential Fellow at the Linda Hall Science Library and Arboretum. At the University of Iowa, she was a Humanities for the Public Good summer fellow and co-curated the exhibition Alternate Paths: New Object Histories from Africa to America at the Stanley Museum of Art. Her prize-winning research and writing have been supported by Historians of Eighteenth Century Art and Architecture (HECAA), the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, and the University of Iowa Graduate College. Recently, she gave the paper “Climatic Botany, Natural Disasters, and Girodet’s Scène de Déluge: Environmental Anxiety in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Art” at the 2026 meeting of the American Society for Environmental History. 

Amelia completed her MA at the University of Iowa with a concentration in modern and contemporary art. Amelia has taught Rhetoric and served as a Teaching Assistant for courses like Art and Architecture of the Islamic World, Asian Art and Culture, Arts of Africa, and Mona Lisa to Modernism (Western survey). Before coming to Iowa, she held a curatorial internship in modern and contemporary art at the Saint Louis Art Museum.