Karen L. Georgi is a Modernist who specializes in 19th century American painting, and theory and criticism. In her writing and in her courses, she often looks at issues of historiography, or how historians and critics have written about art and its past. What questions have we asked, what ideas and definitions have emerged, what patterns of thought can we identify? She teaches courses in Renaissance art, 19th and 20th century art, and the art of the U.S. Georgi’s book, Critical Shift: Rereading Jarves, Cook, Stillman, and the Narratives of 19th Century American Art (Penn State University Press, 2013), studies mid-nineteenth century American art criticism, three of its principal representatives - James Jackson Jarves, Clarence Cook, and William Stillman - and the ideas modern scholars have attached to their words.