Chair and associate professor of art history discusses Gothic Revival on Academic Minute

Kerry Dean Carso, chair and associate professor of art history, was featured on the nationally syndicated educational radio program “The Academic Minute,” in a July 8 broadcast.

Carso discusses Gothic Revival and what makes the mysterious exciting.

“From the very beginning, the Gothic has been a phenomenon that crosses modern disciplinary boundaries,” she said. “The Gothic literary genre transported its late eighteenth and nineteenth-century readers to an imaginary realm, a pseudo-medieval place filled with dungeons, caverns, and subterranean labyrinths.  Haunted castles, lascivious monks, disembodied voices—the trappings of the Gothic novel gripped readers with spine-tingling tales of treacherous villains and virtuous heroines. Without risking a hair on one’s head, the Gothic reader vicariously experienced supernatural happenings and gained access to the awful and sublime secrets of the human soul.”

Carso teaches courses in American art and architecture, with a special emphasis on the Hudson Valley region. Her research focuses on interconnections between the arts and literature in nineteenth-century America.  She is the author of American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature, winner of the 2015 Henry-Russell Hitchcock Award from the Victorian Society in America.

To listen to Carso’s “Academic Minute” in its entirety, visit http://academicminute.org/2016/07/kerry-dean-carso-suny-new-paltz-gothic-revival/.

About “The Academic Minute”
“The Academic Minute” is an educationally focused radio segment produced by WAMC in Albany, N.Y., a National Public Radio member station. The show features an array of faculty from colleges and universities across the country discussing the unique, high-impact aspects of their research. The program airs every weekday and is run multiple times during the day on about 50 different member stations across the National Public Radio spectrum. For more information, visit http://academicminute.org/.