mcarroll@wellesley.edu
(781) 283-2654
Faculty emerita
B.A., Barnard College; A.M., Ph.D., Harvard University
Professor Emerita of Art
Primary research in the field of 16th- and 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting, with specialized work on Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Rubens, and Rembrandt.
My primary research has been in the field of 16th- and 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting, with specialized work on Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Rubens, and Rembrandt. In 2008 my book, Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens, and their Contemporaries , was published by Penn State University Press. I am currently writing a study of Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights." A consistent theme in my work has been the analysis of the ways painters register the changing balance of power between men and women and between rulers and subjects in the 16th and 17th centuries.
In addition to offering courses on painting and printmaking in northern Europe between the 15th and 17th centuries, I also have been teaching seminars on film. Domesticity and Its Discontents surveys representations of the domestic interiors and family relations from paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt to Hollywood melodramas and their contemporary variants by filmmakers like Ousmane Sembene (Senegal), and Moufida Tlatli (Tunisia).