Rate My Professor Rachel Harmeyer

Dr. Rachel Harmeyer is an Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Visual Art + Design at Southeastern Louisiana University, where she teaches courses on subjects ranging from Early Modern to Contemporary Art. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from Rice University in spring 2022. Her dissertation, titled “After Angelica Kauffman: The Art of the Copy in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain,” examined the proliferation of Angelica Kauffman’s imagery in visual and material culture during and after her lifetime, saturating late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British print culture and extending to North America and East Asia through trade networks. Advised by Dr. Leo Costello, her doctoral research was supported by research and travel grants from the Brown Foundation and a summer travel grant from the Decorative Arts Trust. Prior to joining Southeastern Louisiana University, Harmeyer taught classes at Rice University and Houston Community College. She held curatorial fellowships at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in the European Art and American Painting and Sculpture departments and was awarded a Jameson Fellowship for American Decorative Arts at the Bayou Bend Collection.

Harmeyer’s research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and American art and visual culture, particularly painting, sculpture, printmaking, and artmaking practices historically associated with women, especially the textile arts. Her publication “The Education of Daughters: Embroidered Pictures after Angelica Kauffman” appears in the chapter collection The Enlightened Mind: Education in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Amanda Strasik and published by Vernon Press in 2022. She is currently transforming her dissertation into a book. Additional scholarly works include “Objects of Immortality: Hairwork and Mourning in Victorian Visual Culture” (2018) and “The Hair As Remembrancer: Hairwork and the Technology of Memory” (2013). Harmeyer has presented at conferences such as the CAA 2024 Annual Conference with “Georgian Gender Trouble: Angelica Kauffman’s Men and Posthumous Legacy” and the CAA 2019 Annual Conference with “After Angelica Kauffman: Early Mechanical Reproduction and the “Angelicamad” World.” She delivered the public lecture “Picturing Liberty: The Many Faces of Marianne” for Southeastern Louisiana University’s Women’s History Month series.