Amelia F RauserCharles A. Dana Professor of Art History

Biography

I am currently serving as Charles A. Dana Professor of Art History and Senior Associate Dean of the Faculty at Franklin & Marshall College.

My first book, Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints, explored the origins of political caricature in the eighteenth century. My second book, The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s, is a study of the radical neoclassical fashion of the 1790s and its connection to contemporary aesthetic, political, and scientific thought. Please take a look at my online lecture related to the book, "Black Bodies and Neoclassical Whiteness in the Age of Undress," given for the Lewis Walpole Library. Here's a short, accessible essay on madras cloth as cultural appropriation in the 1790s, and a lecture about my book given to the National Arts Club of New York. 

An exhibition I have co-curated with Dr. Laura Engel, Artful Nature: Fashion and Theatricality, opened at the Lewis Walpole Library (Yale University) in February 2020; you can view the exhibition online, and watch a short video tour with the curators. 

In 2020 I won the Bradley R. Dewey award for scholarship at Franklin & Marshall College. I am the past president of the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA). 

My research has been featured in recent editions of the popular history websites Atlas Obscura, on the real meaning of the "Yankee Doodle" song, and History Buffs, on the "fashion" for tuberculosis. Here's a Huffington Post article about my team-developed humanities course for first-year students on "the examined life."

I received my BA from University of California, Berkeley and my MA and PhD from Northwestern University. 

Awards and Recognition:

2022, Charles A. Dana Distinguished Professor endowed chair

2020, Bradley R. Dewey award for outstanding research at Franklin & Marshall College

2018-19, Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship, India

2014, NEH “Enduring Questions” Award, with co-applicants Lee Franklin, Misty Bastian, and Stephen Cooper. $50,000 to support development of a new course for first-year students, “What is the Examined Life?”; 11% of proposals funded

2012, NEH Summer Stipend Award; 8.5% of proposals funded

2008, CPC/Mellon Award; travel and research in support of new book project