Amelia's research asks: What if we treated trees as equally important to human figures in painting? She hopes to uncover new ecological, social, and artistic meaning by considering trees as generative actors in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting. Their dissertation “Trees as Bodies of Communication: The Arboreal Aesthetic in French Painting, 1780-1870” draws on artistic theory, environmental history, and scientific knowledge to investigate how tree and human bodies create critical narratives. Having completed an MA in modern and contemporary art, she also puts eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art in conversation with contemporary work (like understanding how contemporary sculpture imagines climate change through the lens of eighteenth-century folly architecture). 

Amelia has completed internships at the Saint Louis Art Museum and Flood Plain, an experimental art space in St. Louis. 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. Recently, she gave the paper “The Twofold Transgressions of Tree-Body Hybridity in Fabre’s The Dying Saint Sebastian” at the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association conference in Louisville and presented her dissertation research at the 2025 Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture Emerging Scholar Showcase.