Barbara Lynn-Davis
Senior Lecturer in Art
Research focuses on art and historical imagination.
My pleasure is using the beauty and meanings of Italian art, literature, and gardens as jumping off points for writing.
My passion for art and writing includes historical fiction. I am the author of a novel set in eighteenth-century Venice, Casanova’s Secret Wife (Kensington Publishing, 2017). The story is based on an actual account by Giacomo Casanova, the world's most infamous chronicler of seduction: but I tell it from the woman's point of view. I am currently at work on Searching for Raphael. The novel is based on the true story of a painting by the Renaissance artist that was stolen from the Czartoryski Collection in Poland by the Nazis, and never found.
At Wellesley, I have been able to unite these two intellectual threads—art, and writing—to bring out the best in students’ ideas. I am most proud that many of my students have won the college-wide Three Generations Prize for First-Year Writing.
Education
- B.A., Brown University
- M.A., Williams College
- Ph.D., Princeton University
Current and upcoming courses
Why does art matter? Because images, sculptures and buildings shape our ways of understanding our world and ourselves. Learning how to look closely and analyze what you see, therefore, is fundamental to a liberal arts education. Within a global frame, this course provides an introduction to art and its histories through a series of case studies, from Egypt's Queen Nefertiti to Jean-Michel Basquiat's raw street art. Meeting three times weekly, each section will draw on the case studies to explore concepts of gender and race, nature and landscape, culture and power, repatriation, and other issues. Assignments focus on developing analytical and expressive writing skills and will engage with the rich resources of Wellesley College and of Boston's art museums. The course fulfills both the Writing requirement and the ARTH 100 requirement for art history, architecture, and studio majors.