Rachel Himes

Rachel Hunter Himes joined the PhD program in 2020. Her dissertation, tentatively titled Black Luxuries: Race, Slavery, and Abolition in French Decorative Art, 1794-1848 explores the decorative arts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France as sites for the development and maintenance of racial ideology, focusing on a diverse group of objects produced across this period. Her research has been supported by grants from the Decorative Arts Trust, The Huntington Library and Art Museum, the Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation, and Columbia's Office of the Provost. She is a 2025 Center for Curatorial Leadership/Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice participant.

Rachel graduated magna cum laude with a BA in Religious Studies from Brown University and a BFA in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design. Prior to studying at Columbia, Rachel worked as the Assistant Museum Educator for School Programs at The Frick Collection. She has held positions at The Frick Collection, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she provided curatorial assistance to the exhibition Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast and contributed a chronology to the exhibition's publication. Her writing has appeared in n+1, The Nation, the New York Review of Architecture, Apollo, and the Journal of Museum Education.