Rachel Harmeyer, Ph.D.

Dr. Rachel Harmeyer is an Assistant Professor of Art History and teaches courses on subjects ranging from Early Modern to Contemporary Art. Before joining Southeastern Louisiana University’s faculty, she 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.

Her doctoral research at Rice University was supported by research and travel grants from the Brown Foundation and a summer travel grant from The Decorative Arts Trust. Harmeyer’s research on Angelica Kauffman’s art and its use as a pedagogical tool for young women in Britain and the United States appears in the chapter “The Education of Daughters: Embroidered Pictures after Angelica Kauffman,” in The Enlightened Mind: Education in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Amanda Strasik, published by Vernon Press, 2022. She is currently working on transforming her dissertation, After Angelica Kauffman, into a book.

Area of Expertise

Eighteenth and Nineteenth-century European and American art and visual culture. Harmeyer’s research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, printmaking, and artmaking practices historically associated with women, especially the textile arts.