Ms. Elizabeth Rauh is a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art at the University of Michigan. She specializes in modern and contemporary art and visual cultures of the Arab world and Iran, and is currently writing her dissertation project examining how prominent artists in the twentieth-century Middle East harnessed popular religious traditions and folk practices in their artworks as mediations of Islamic heritage in global modern art.
Along with studies in modern and contemporary art practices, she also works in early modern Persian visual arts, Shi’i Islamic visual cultures, and issues of image making across different eras in the history of the Islamic world. In 2013, she was awarded the Rhonda A. Saad Prize for “Best Graduate Paper in Modern and Contemporary Arab Art,” and was recently published in the new volume "Creative Dissent: Visual Arts of the Arab World Uprisings" for her research on Bahrain's 2011 Pearl Roundabout protests. She was recently awarded the Irving Stenn, Jr. Mellon Curatorial Fellowship at the University of Michigan Museum of Art for 2018-2019.