On leave Fall 2024
Professor Rather is the author of The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2016). The book was awarded the 2018 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the New England Society Book Award for Art, and was short listed for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History. During many years of research toward the book, Rather received grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Tyson Scholars program at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Winterthur Museum, the American Council of Learned Societies, Yale Center for British Art, Massachusetts Historical Society, and The University of Texas. She has published articles and book reviews in a variety of journals, including American Art, Archives of American Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Arts Magazine, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal of the Early Republic, Metropolitan Museum Journal, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Source, Theatre Notebook, William and Mary Quarterly, and Winterthur Portfolio, as well as essays in exhibition catalogues and edited volumes. Rather holds a PhD from the University of Delaware and, at the outset of her scholarly career, engaged issues of modernism in early-twentieth-century American and European sculpture, culminating in Archaism, Modernism, and the Art of Paul Manship (1993).