Biography

Art historian Wendy Wassyng Roworth is an expert on eighteenth-century artist Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807). Her research on Kauffman and other artists, especially Salvator Rosa (1615-1641), has been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Society, Getty Research Institute, and the University of Rhode Island Council for Research. In 1998-99 Professor Roworth served as Scholar-in-Residence at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC.

She was curator of the exhibition Angelica Kauffman, a Continental Artist in Georgian England (Brighton and York, 1992-93) and was featured speaker and contributor to the Angelika Kauffmann exhibition in Bregenz and Schwarzenberg, Austria, in 2007. She edited the book Italy’s Eighteenth-Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour with Paula Findlen and Catherine Sama (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), which includes her essay ‘The Residence of the Arts’: Angelica Kauffman’s Place in Rome.” 

Roworth’s articles and reviews have been published in the Art Bulletin, Burlington Magazine, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Getty Research Journal, Woman’s Art Journal, and other academic journals, and she has lectured at museums, universities, and conferences nationally and internationally in Italy, England, Austria, Ireland, and Germany.

In 2022-23 Professor Roworth was President of ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) and previously she served as Vice-President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 2010-12 and 1994-98. Her service at URI included two terms as President of the URI-AAUP faculty union, as a Faculty Senator, and as Chair of the Department of Art and Art History.