Goucher College's
Authors Series

April Oettinger is Professor of Art History, Chair of the Visual & Material Culture Program, and Director of the recently inaugurated Sweren Wogan Institute for the Study of the Book at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. A co-author of Green Worlds in Early Modern Italy: Art and the Verdant Earth, this presentation explores the relationship between humans and nature in Renaissance Italy. Through the art of Botticelli, Titian, and their peers, the gardenscapes of Tivoli, and the imagined landscapes of 16th-century dream literature, we will take a close look at the ways in which painters and poets envisioned the lyrical, sometimes haunting, character of the green world.

In the unique and charming memoir Blue Tulip, supported by substantial historical research, author Posey Pincoffs Boicourt '71 leaves home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, setting out on a series of adventures where she rediscovered the world of a forgotten portrait painter in her family who had worked in Napoleon's Court. Her book Blue Tulip takes its title from an identity she assumes en route.

Dr. Mel Michelle Lewis ‘02 is Associate Professor of Gender/Sexuality & Black/Ethnic Studies and incoming chair of Studio and Humanistic Studies at Maryland Institute College of Art, cultivating Black feminist intersectional queer critical race social justice pedagogies for liberatory art and design education and creative practice. They will read from their manuscript Biomythography Bayou, a decolonizing narrative portraiture project featuring experimental performative writing. With an emphasis on queer, intersex, trans, and femme embodied knowledges, this book engages West African worldviews, Poarch Band (Creek Nation) wisdom, and Black Catholic Creole cosmology, offering readers archival histories, contemporary political discourse, and tellings from the ancestral imaginary.