Teaching Interests

Professor Carso teaches courses in American art and architecture, with a special emphasis on the Hudson Valley region.

Research/Creative Activity

Her research focuses on interconnections between the arts and literature in nineteenth-century America.

Professor Carso has two on-going research projects: a study of the influence of Gothic literature and historical romances on American art and architecture, 1800-1850, and a study of follies, prospect towers, ruins, and summerhouses in the nineteenth-century American landscape. Her research has been supported by fellowships and scholarships at the Huntington Library; the Attingham Summer School; the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library; the Library Company; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; and the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello.

Publications

She has published several articles on Gothic Revival architecture and Romantic painting in peer-reviewed journals including Mosaic, Winterthur Portfolio, Symbiosis, and The Hudson River Valley Review. Her essay on architecture in Hudson River School paintings appeared in the exhibition catalogue for The Hudson River to Niagara Falls: Nineteenth-Century Landscape Paintings from the New-York Historical Society _(2009) at the Dorsky Museum of Art on the SUNY New Paltz campus. Professor Carso also published an essay “Man and Nature in the Hudson Valley” in the exhibition catalogue _Russel Wright: The Nature of Design (Dorsky, 2012). Her essay “Gothic Castles in the Landscape: Sir Walter Scott and the Hudson River School” appears in Gothic Studies (Nov. 2012).