Acknowledgments

Rauser, Amelia

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Acknowledgments

Amelia Rauser

The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s

Acknowledgments

Author

Amelia Rauser

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23217

Acknowledgments

I’m grateful to several institutions and many kind and generous people, without whom I would not have been able to pursue—and finally complete—this engrossing project of many years. I owe a great deal to the special environment at Franklin & Marshall College, a liberal arts college with a strong culture of faculty scholarship. Its openness and interdisciplinarity stimulated the broadening of my interests into new mediums and geographic areas, and ongoing financial support for my research, especially under the leadership of Provost Ann Steiner, allowed me to be intellectually ambitious in mastering new archives and traveling when and where needed. Support and inspiration from colleagues created an environment of creativity and achievement. Most importantly, the key ideas for this book were developed in my classes, in conversation with our students. Explaining something to smart undergraduates is the best training for any scholar.

Many thanks are due to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a Summer Stipend grant near the start of the project that allowed me to extend its reach to Naples. In addition, the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA), and its parent organization, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), have nurtured me since my graduate student days. Our rigorous, supportive, and often riotous annual meetings counterbalanced the isolation of my liberal-arts idyll, sharpened my arguments, and augmented the joy of art-historical discovery. The curators of several collections allowed me to study their historic garments or other objects: thank you to the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg, the Lady Lever Art Gallery, the Lewis Walpole Library, the Manchester Gallery of Costume, the Münchner Stadtmuseum, the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Palais Galliera, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. A Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship in India at the end of the project broadened my perspective and laid the groundwork for future work.

Many parts of this book were presented in front of audiences or read by colleagues who improved the ideas with their thoughtful criticism, and I’m grateful for those invitations and interlocutors. Particular thanks are due to Sarah Betzer, Timothy Campbell, Hilary Davidson, Carolyn A. Day, Justine De Young, Laura Engel, Noémie Étienne, Mechthild Fend, Douglas Fordham, Amy Freund, Jennifer Germann, Craig Hanson, Meredith Martin, Amber Ludwig Otero, Andrei Pop, Nancy Ramage, Cynthia Roman, Susan L. Siegfried, Heidi Strobel, Michael Yonan, and Tara Zanardi.

Writing this book mostly happened around a table with friends—my Writing Sisters—and I’m so grateful for their support and inspiring example: Rachel Anderson-Rabern, Alexis Castor, Jennifer Kibbe, Alison Kibler, Giovanna Faleschini Lerner, Stephanie McNulty, Gretchen Meyers, Yeva Nersisyan, Jennifer Redmann, and Laura Shelton. Amy Mulnix and Cindy Wingenroth got us started and sustained us.

Maria Mitchell and Guillaume de Syon’s multilingual help improved my translations and got me into a special archive. Corinne de Syon was my Paris-based research assistant. Sona Thomas and colleagues at St. Teresa’s College, Kochi, India, provided a home for the book’s concluding phase. Yale University Press’s stellar team of editors and designers produced a beautiful book. Amy Moreno fixed my mistakes. Carolyn A. Day was a dream collaborator. Alison Kibler urged me to think big. Lee Franklin and Marci Nelligan encouraged every stage and they, along with Ellie Rice, even watched my children at times to help make it happen. Alexis Castor has been my essential intellectual, travel, research, and writing companion. Michael Clapper sparked years of sustaining conversations about art, dress, and ideas.

My family is my greatest joy and I thank them for supporting my ambition even at the expense, at times, of their own comfort: thank you Michael, Henry, and Agatha Clapper. I did it, thanks to you.

This book is dedicated to the fashionable women in my family who instructed me in the many languages clothes can speak, and whose dignity and agency in good times and bad was often expressed creatively through dress: aunties Emly Lunell Hardy, Milbie Benge, Annie Armstrong, Grace Rauser Pierson, and Kirsti Cripe Rauser; my grandmother Ruth Rauser; and especially my mother, Bernie Rauser, as well as to my strong and inspiring daughter, Agatha Zinnia Clapper.

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