Dr. Susan Rather holds the Meredith and Cornelia Long Chair of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she chairs the Department of Art and Art History. During the early years of her career, Rather studied issues of modernism in early 20th-century American and European sculpture, work that culminated in her 1993 book "Archaism, Modernism, and the Art of Paul Manship." Her most recent book, published by Yale University Press in 2016, is "The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era." This volume received the Smithsonian’s 2018 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in American Art, the 2017 New England Society Book Award for Art, and was short-listed for the 2017 William MB Berger Prize for British Art History.

Over the many years of research for that project, Rather won grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Tyson Scholars Program at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Winterthur Museum, American Council of Learned Societies, Yale Center for British Art and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Her publications include essays for edited volumes and exhibition catalogues, as well as articles and book reviews for a wide variety of journals in the fields of history, art history and even theater history, among them American Art, Art Bulletin, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal of the Early Republic, Theatre Notebook, William and Mary Quarterly and Winterthur Portfolio.