Rachel Dressler

Areas of Expertise: Baseball and film

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Rachel Dressler, Associate Professor of Art History and former Chair of the Art and Art History Department, is a specialist in medieval art. She earned her PhD 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 and their articulation of concerns over social position and gender. 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 several articles including, “'Those effigies which belonged to the English Nation': Antiquarianism, Nationalism and Charles Alfred Stothard's Monumental Effigies of Great Britain," Studies in Medievalism (August 2005): 143-174; "The Contracting Discourse: Feminist Scholarship and Medieval Art," Medieval Feminist Forum 43.1 (2007): 15-34; and "Cross-Legged Knights and Signification in English Medieval Tomb Sculpture," Studies in Iconography 21 (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.

Professor Dressler is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art (www.differentvisions.org), an on-line, open-access journal devoted to progressive approaches to the study of medieval art. 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.