Rachel A. Zimmerman is Assistant Professor of Art History at Colorado State University-Pueblo. She holds an MA and a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Delaware, and bachelor's degrees in art history and German from New Mexico State University. She specializes in art and material culture in colonial Ibero-America and the early modern Portuguese world. Her secondary area of focus is the art of early modern Northern Europe. Dr. Zimmerman has been studying the art and architecture of Minas Gerais since her first trip to the region in 2006. Her dissertation, “Global Luxuries at Home: The Material Possessions of an Elite Family in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil,” analyzes post-mortem inventories to reconstruct elite material culture in the gold-mining region of Brazil. A former dissertation research fellow at the Winterthur Museum and Library and participant in the 2015 Summer Institute in Technical Art History on Material Movement, her work emphasizes transoceanic exchange, sensory experience, and the significance of materials and techniques. She has written about hammocks as a mode of transportation, and is currently examining questions surrounding elite dress and chinoiserie for her book project on elite material culture in the city of Mariana. |