Rachel Oberter has spent 20 years researching and writing about Victorian spirit drawing. She published one of the first articles on the Victorian drawing medium Georgiana Houghton in the journal Victorian Studies in 2006 and completed a Ph.D. thesis called Spiritualism and the Visual Imagination in Victorian Britain at Yale University in 2007.
Other publications include an essay on the automatic drawings of Anna Mary Howitt, which appeared in The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth Century Spiritualism and the Occult in 2012.
Rachel has written a new essay on Georgiana Houghton that will appear in the forthcoming volume, Georgiana Houghton:"Believe Not Every Spirit, But Try the Spirits," edited by Lars Bang Larsen and Marco Pasi. She is also currently completing a book manuscript on Howitt and Houghton entitled The Artist as Medium: Spiritualism and the Invention of Automatic Drawing.
She has taught art history at Haverford College and New York University and was a fellow at the Morgan Library and Museum. Rachel lives in New York City.