Patricia Johnston studies how early American arts were influenced by global trade, especially trade with Asia. She is the Rev. J. Gerard Mears, S.J., Chair in Fine Arts and Chair of the Visual Arts Department at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester MA, and a nationally recognized scholar of American art and its wider visual culture. Her edited volume, Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture (University of California, 2006), examines how concepts of high and low art changed from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and how this evolution influenced representations of social conditions.