R. Tripp Evans is a Professor of the History of Art at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where he specializes in American material culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He earned his B.A. in Architectural History from the University of Virginia and his M.A. and Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University, where he was named the Henry S. McNeil Fellow in American Decorative Arts. He is the author of three books: Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-1915 (University of Texas Press, 2004); Grant Wood: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010); and The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home (Rowman and Littlefiedl, 2024). His biography of Grant Wood received the National Award for Arts Writing.