Rachel Dressler
Rachel Dressler, Associate Professor of Art History, is a specialist in medieval art. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University in 1994, with a dissertation on medieval visual narrative at Chartres Cathedral. Her current research focusses on English tomb effgies of armored knights and their articulation of concerns over social position and masculinity. She is also interested in English and American Medieval Revival art and architecture. Professor Dressler's most recent publications include a book, Of Armor and Men in Medieval England: the Chivalric Rhetoric of Three English Knights' Effigies, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004, and two articles, "Cross-Legged Knights and Signification in English Medieval Tomb Sculpture," Studies in Iconography21 (2000): 91-121 and "Steel Corpse: Imaging the Knight in Death," in Jacqueline Murray, ed., Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, New York and London: Garland Publishing Limited, 1999, 135-167. Her teaching concentrates on Western European art and architecture between c. 400 CE and 1500 CE, and includes courses such as "Survey of Western Art I," an overview of Western art from the Pre-historic period through the Middle Ages; and "Gothic Art and Architecture," a survey of images and buildings of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. She also teaches more specialized courses such as "The Art of Medieval Knighthood," an examination of medieval knightly culture and "Women in Medieval Art and Society," which investigates the role of women and their visual representation during the European Middle Ages.
