Nicola Courtright

Amherst College, Amherst, MA

September–December 2012

Nicola Courtright is Professor in the Department of Art and the History of Art at Amherst College and teaches the art and architecture of early modern Europe. She is the author of The Papacy and the Art of Reform in Sixteenth-Century Rome: Gregory XIII’s Tower of the Winds in the Vatican(2003). Her current book project, Art and the Invention of Queenly Authority in Early Modern France, examines how gardens, art and architecture in royal residences were crafted to support the authority of queens in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, women who were not officially sanctioned to rule but were nevertheless often in positions of authority.