Rebecca Houze

Title:	Professor
Department:	Art History
Office Location:	Jack Arends Building 203J
Office Phone:	815-753-1473
Office Fax:	815-753-7701
Email:	rhouze@niu.edu
Website:	niu.academia.edu/RebeccaHouze

Educational Background

• Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2000
• M.A., University of Chicago, 1995
• B.A., University of Washington, 1993

Research Interests

• Design and heritage
• Visual and material culture of travel
• Women's contributions to modern design
• International exhibitions, open-air museums, and national parks
• Textiles and fashion

Courses Taught

• ARTH 292 - Introduction to Modern Arts and Design
• ARTH 361/ ENVS 361X - History of Sustainable Design
• ARTH 362 - History of Visual Communication
• ARTH 456/656 - Topics in Design History
  • Fashion, Modernism, and Modernity
  • Vienna 1900
  • World's Fair
  • Open-Air Museum to National Park
• ARTH 701 - Graduate Seminar in Art History
  • Women Designers
  • New Mythologies
  • What is Design History?

Recent topics include Women Designers and From World's Fair to National Park.

Student Research

Professor Houze has supervised undergraduate and graduate research projects on diverse design topics, including architectural signage, fashion photography, video games, cross-dressing, the Gibson girl, IKEA, industrial furnishings in the nineteenth century, modern art in Vienna, Grimm's Brothers fairy tale illustrations, Navajo (Diné) weaving and the 1933 Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago. She welcomes inquiries from current and prospective students who are interested in working with her.

Selected Publications

Professor Houze is an art and design historian whose research focuses on Central Europe with an emphasis on women designers. Her first book, Textiles, Fashion, and Design Reform in Austria-Hungary Before the First World War: Principles of Dress (2015) was supported by a Joint Austria-Hungary Fulbright Fellowship. Her collection of essays, New Mythologies in Design and Culture: Reading Signs and Symbols in the Visual Landscape (2016) explores our designed world with stories of familiar brand marks and popular objects such as the McDonald's Golden Arches, Apple iPhone, and Nike Swoosh. She is currently working on a new book, which investigates the design of heritage at world’s fairs and national parks in Europe and North America.

Current Projects and International Collaboration

Rebecca has held research residencies at the University of Hertfordshire (UK) and the Technical University of Darmstadt. In 2022, she was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. Her work has been published in the Journal of Design History, Design Issues, and the Journal of Austrian-American History, and she presents her research regularly at the annual meetings of the College Art Association and its affiliated society, Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art; the Design History Society; and the American Society for Environmental History, among others. She serves as a faculty advisor for the doctoral program in Critical Heritage Studies (DHeritage) at the University of Hertfordshire and presents lectures regularly for the School of Art and Design at Wuhan University of Technology in Wuhan, China.

For the past decade, Rebecca has worked closely with a team of design historians in Europe and North America to produce the third volume of Victor Margolin's World History of Design, which will be published by Bloomsbury in 2026. The project builds on the first two volumes of Prof. Margolin's unfinished design history with new and unexpected narratives of postwar design by expert contributors who were shaped by its legacy. Currently, she works with scholars from England, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Germany, Mexico, and Malaysia who share an interest in transnational design histories and histories of women designers.

Institutional Affiliations

• Institute for the Study of the Environment, Sustainability and Energy
• Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality