School of Art & Art History

USF College of Design, Art & Performance

Elisabeth Fraser

Professor, Art History
Ph.D. Yale University
Phone: 813.974.9325
Email: fraser@usf.edu
Office: FAH 272

Elisabeth Fraser specializes in the history of art from the 17th to 19th centuries in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, teaching classes on travel, collecting, and global material culture.  She is the author of Mediterranean Encounters: Artists Between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774-1839 (Penn State University Press, 2017) and Delacroix, Art and Patrimony in Post-Revolutionary France (Cambridge University Press, 2004).  A recipient of research fellowships from the NEH, DAAD, Getty, and AAUW, among others, she has recently edited a volume of essays, The Mobility of People and Things in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Routledge, 2020), and is currently writing a book on Ottoman costume albums and their relationship to European print culture, Dressing the Ottoman Empire: Early Modern Costume Albums and Transculturation. Her essay, “The Ottoman Costume Album as Mobile Object and Agent of Contact,” was recently awarded a prize by the Forum for Early-Modern Empires and Global Interaction (FEEGI).

Publications:

Book cover: Mediterranean Encounters by Dr. Elisabeth Fraser

In this volume, Dr. Fraser shows that artists and the works they created in the Mediterranean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were informed by mutual dependence and reciprocity between European nations and the Ottoman Empire. Her rich exploration of this vibrant cross-cultural exchange challenges the dominant interpretation of European relations with the East during the period, revealing a shared world of fluid and long-sustained interactions.

“Ę’: Mouradgea d’Ohsson’s Tableau général de l’Empire Othoman,” in thematic issue of Ars Orientalis 39, “Globalizing Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteenth Century,” Nebahat Avcıoğlu and Barry Flood, eds. (2011), pp. 198-230.

“Images of Uncertainty: Delacroix and the Art of Nineteenth-Century Expansionism,” chapter in Mary Sheriff, ed., Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration, University of North Carolina Press (2010), pp. 123-151.

“,” Art History 31:3 (June 2008), pp. 342-67.

“La politique de la famille sous la Restauration: Les Massacres de Scio d’Eugène Delacroix,” chapter in Natalie Scholz and Christine Schröer, eds., Représentation et pouvoir: la politique symbolique (1789-1830) (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2007), pp. 175-84.

“A propos des sources de Delacroix; Dante et Virgile et l’autorité paternelle,” chapter in Sébastien Allard, ed., Paris 1820: L’Affirmation de la génération romantique (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 101-12.

“,” French Historical Studies 26: 2 (Spring 2003), pp. 315-49.

"," Oxford Art Journal 21:1 (Spring 1998), pp. 87-103. [on Delacroix’s Massacres of Chios]


Fellowships

I have received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2007-08, 1997-98, 1995), and I was a resident fellow at the Columbia University Institute for Scholars (Paris) in 2007-08. I have also been awarded the Fredson Bower Prize of the Bibliographical Society (U.K.), a Gilbert Chinard Fellowship, a grant from American Association of University Women, and a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Fellowship for Recent Ph.D.s.


Teaching

My recent seminars include “Collecting the East; Art and the “New Biography;” “Art, Travel, and Imperialism;” “Orientalism: Then and Now; Art and Gender; and Theory of the French Avant-Garde.” I have won two teaching awards from the University of South Florida: the Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award and an award from the Teaching Incentive Program.