Advisor: Costello, Leo

Allison Springer received a bachelor’s degree in Apparel Design and a master's degree in art history from the University of Alabama. During her time at Rice, Allison has served as the 2018-19 Jameson Fellow at the Bayou Bend Collection with the MFAH, the 2019-20 Art History Faculty-Graduate Student liaison, the 2017-20 Humanities representative and 2020-21 ombudsperson for the Graduate Honors Council, the 2020-21 HGSA Treasurer, the 2021-22 GSA Director of Teaching Development and 2021-22 Graduate Student Representative on the University Committee on Teaching. She currently serves as the Center for Teaching Excellence liaison for the Department of Art History and teaches a FWIS 100 course called “Learning to View and Interpret Art: Re-Evaluating Classical Art for a Modern Era.”

Allison’s dissertation "Race, Identity, and the French Caribbean in American Visual Culture (1780-1865)," investigates the transatlantic influence of French and French Caribbean culture on the construction of American visual culture from the mid-eighteenth century until the end of the American Civil War. In particular, she explores how American representation of women of color responds to Caribbean depictions of women of color, especially biracial women, while examining how these representations convey colonial anxieties over the increasing inability of black bodies to visually signify racial and social identities. Her current interests include nineteenth-century American and European art and the transatlantic commonalities of visual culture between them, specifically in the context of social and cultural history as it pertains to changing social ideals, technological advances, and the development of modernism.