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    • Amelia Rauser

    Associate Professor of Art History
    Art and Art History
    American Studies
    717-358-4659
    Huegel Alumni House
    Office: HUE-24
    Office Hours: Tuesdays, 10-11 a.m. and 1-:2:30 p.m., or by appointment
    Summary: Historian of the modern period, specializing in European art from the 18th century to the present. Her book, Caricature Unmasked, was published in 2008. Her current research project centers on the dramatic change in fashionable dress around 1800 and the meaning of neoclassicism.
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    Education

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

    Research Interests

    My new research project, "Living Statues: Neoclassical Culture and Fashionable Dress in the 1790s-- London, Paris, Naples," centers on the dramatic change in fashionable dress for both men and women that occurred in the West in the 1780s and 1790s, and its implications for modern gender identity, aesthetics, and citizenship.  

    I've also recently published and spoken on the 18th century caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson, and was interviewed about caricature in this post.

    In 2011, my students and I curated an exhibition at the Lancaster Quilt & Textile Museum titled "The Grid:  ESPRIT, Amish Quilts, and Postmodern Design." 

    Publications

    My book, Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints, was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2008.  

    Other publications include:

     “The Tyranny of the Bodily in Rowlandson’s Art.” Jay Clarke, ed., Landscape, Innovation, and Nostalga: The Manton Collection of British Art at the Clark Art Institute. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012.

    “Amoral Humor: Desire and Mockery in Rowlandson’s Comic Art.”  
    Thomas Rowlandson: Pleasures and Pursuits in Georgian England.  London: Giles, 2011.
     
    “The Englishness of French Revolutionary Caricature.”  
    Better in France?  The Circulation of Ideas Across the Channel in the 18th Century, edited by Frédéric Ogée.  Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005.
     
    “Hair, Authenticity, and the Self-Made Macaroni.”  
    Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 38 no. 1, 2004: 101-117. 
     
    “Sex and Sensibility: Hair in the Macaroni Caricatures of the 1770s.”  
    Hair: Untangling a Social History, edited by Penny Jolly.  Saratoga Springs, NY: Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, 2004.
     
    “The Butcher-Kissing Duchess of Devonshire: Between Allegory and Caricature in 1784.”  
    Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 36 no. 1, 2002: 23-46.
     
    “Embodied Liberty: Why Hogarth’s Caricature of John Wilkes Backfired.”  
    The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference, edited by Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
     
    “Death or Liberty: British Political Prints and the Struggle for Symbols in the American Revolution.” 
    Oxford Art Journal, vol. 21 no. 2, 1998: 151-171.
     

    Presentations

    Recent presentations and invited lectures:

    "Ribald Antiquity: Bodies, Statues, and the Lust for Classicism in Rowlandson’s Art," Block Museum, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. March 2, 2011

    "Neoclassical Fashion in Art and Life in the 1790s," College Art Association Meeting (CAA), New York City. February 9-12, 2011
     
    "Attitudes: Living Antiquity in 1790s Naples," Art Institute of Chicago, symposium in honor of Prof. Hollis Clayson. October 23, 2010
     

    Course Information

    ART 103: A Survery of Western Art

    ART 241: 18th and 19th Century European Art

    ART 251: The Twentieth Century: Art, Fashion, Design

    Special topics seminars have recently included "London and Paris," "The Grid: Amish Quilts," and "Exhibiting Fashion: Modern Dress circa 1800"