Introducing Dr. Rachel Carlisle
Congratulations to Dr. Rachel Carlisle, who defended her dissertation, “Augsburg All’antica: Picturing German Antiquity in the Age of Print,” under the direction of Dr. Stephanie Leitch this spring. In the fall of 2022 she will join the Department of Art, Art History & Design at the University of Alabama in Huntsville as a Lecturer in Art History. During her first semester, she will teach the courses “Survey I: Ancient through Medieval” and “History of Printmaking: 1450-1800.”
Dr. Carlisle specializes in the early modern art of northern Europe (c. 1400-1600) with special interests in transalpine exchanges, patronage and collecting practices, and early development of print technologies. She conducted research for her doctoral dissertation in Augsburg and Munich as a Fulbright Fellow to Germany and in Wolfenbüttel as Rolf und Ursula Schneider-Stiftung Doctoral Fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek. Rachel also held the departmental Patricia Rose Teaching Fellowship, FSU International Programs and Department of Art History Florence Teaching Fellowship, and Kress Language Schools Fellowship to study German at Middlebury Language Schools. Her work has been further supported by grants from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, American Friends of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Renaissance Society of America, and Florida State University.
In the Department of Art History, I found colleagues and teachers that I adore and respect in equal measure. I am especially grateful to Dr. Stephanie Leitch, who steadily guided my education and modeled excellence in teaching and research. I will remember my time at Florida State University with great fondness, and I depart bursting with appreciation for the educators, administrators, and my peers in the Department of Art History who have encouraged, challenged, and inspired me along the way.
Dr. Leitch describes Rachel’s contributions to the field:
Rachel has become an important archaeologist of the printed page, but the scope of her dissertation also encompasses a microhistory of architecture and design in the south German town of Augsburg. An important node on trade routes and imperial itineraries, Augsburg is the site of critical developments in the history of printmaking, portraiture, architecture, and even one of the first early experiments in subsidized housing. While the idea of the rehabilitation of antiquity has underwritten scholarship on the “Renaissance” for quite some time, it has only more recently been problematized by scholars who argue against the wholesale importation of a homogenous antique. Rachel’s project is unique because it not only examines the meansby which antiquity was transported north, but also its intersection with vernacular forms of art making that resisted foreign forms through tenacious local idioms. Her project responds to recent scholarship on northern humanism, antiquarianism, the history of collections, as well as the operations of early modern networks. In her time at FSU, she penned an elegant scholarly study with alacrity, acted as the University’s liason for FSU’s Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies Consortium in Chicago, and has forged important relationships with various museums, archives, libraries, and print collections.