About

Andrea Wolk Rager is the Jesse Hauk Shera Associate Professor in the department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University.  She is also the Associate Director for Fine Arts at the Center for Medicine, Society and Culture at the CWRU School of Medicine.

Dr. Rager is a specialist in 19th- and early 20^th-century British and European art, with a particular focus on the work of painter and decorative artist Edward Burne-Jones. Her research interests include Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, and the Arts & Crafts Movement in 19th-century Britain, the history of photography from the 19th century to the present, art and medicine in the long 19th century, the relationship between art, eco-criticism, and environmental justice from the 19th century to the present, and decolonial approaches to the history of art and the legacy of imperialism in academia and the museum.

Dr. Rager received her PhD from Yale University and held a Postdoctoral Research Associate position at the Yale Center for British Art from 2008 to 2011.  In 2012, she served as co-curator with Angus Trumble for the exhibition Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, and co-edited the accompanying catalogue of the same title published by Yale University Press. Her most recent book, The Radical Vision of Edward Burne-Jones, was published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, distributed by Yale University Press, in the spring of 2022.

Dr. Rager’s other publications include “ ‘The Revenge of Art on Life’: Beauty, Modernity and Edward Burne-Jones’s King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid,” for A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art (2019), edited by Michelle Facos and published by Wiley Blackwell; “ ‘Not on the straight line, but on the spiral’: Frederick H. Evans and the Gothic Inheritance,” published in the journal PhotoResearcher in 2013; “‘Smite this Sleeping World Awake’: Edward Burne-Jones and The Legend of the Briar Rose,” which appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of the journal Victorian Studies; and “Purchasing Paradise: Nostalgic Longing and the Painter of Light™,” for the volume Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall (2011), edited by Alexis Boylan for Duke University Press.  She also co-curated the exhibition Shadows and Dreams: Pictorialist Photography in America, with Dr. Barbara Tannenbaum, on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art from September 2015 to January 2016.  In 2019, Dr. Rager launched The Age of Empires: Britain, France, and the Legacy of Imperialism, a digital gallery tour of the Cleveland Museum of Art through the ArtLens app, the result of a seminar funded by the Mellon Foundation Grant for Collections Seminars in the CWRU/CMA Joint Graduate Program.

She has been nominated for the Carl F. Wittke Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the John S. Diekhoff Award for Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring.  In 2016, she was awarded the John S. Diekhoff Award for Distinguished Graduate Student Teaching.  She has also been the recipient of a Robert W. Wark Fellowship at the Huntington Library, a Paul Mellon Centre Junior Fellowship, and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies.  She has presented her scholarship internationally, including at the annual conferences of the College Art Association, the North American Victorian Studies Association, the Modern Languages Association, and the Nineteenth Century Studies Association.

Dr. Rager welcomes students specializing in European art of the long nineteenth century in a global context, particularly those with an interest in ecocriticism, decolonization, medical humanities, and object-driven social art history across a range of media, including photography, prints, works on paper, decorative arts, sculpture, and painting.