Tara Ward is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century art and visual culture. Her attention to the ways avant-garde artistic practices are integrated into everyday life has led to a diverse array of research interests from how the Orphist painters used color theory to understand the modern city to how the history of the nude relates to legging fashion to Instagram as an artistic practice.  Deeply influenced by Foucault and ordinary language philosophy, Dr. Ward argues for a very broad definition of art and insists that the visual is as meaningful as text.  Her work has been published by the Guggenheim Museum and the Oxford Art Journal, and her current book project is entitled Appreciation Post:  Towards an Art History of Instagram.