Dr. Karen Hope Goodchild, Chapman professor and chair of Art and Art History, is Wofford College’s 2021 SCICU Excellence In Teaching award recipient. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Art History, both from the University of Virginia. Goodchild also received a B.A. in Art History from the University of Georgia.
Goodchild’s Wofford course load includes classes in Ancient Art, Renaissance Art, Gender in the Early Modern Period, Surveys of African Art and Pre-Modern Western Art, and practice-based courses involving community engagement in the arts.
A scholar of the Early Modern period in Italy, Goodchild has recently published articles on landscape theory, Giorgio Vasari, Piero di Cosimo, and Agnolo Bronzino. Her research has appeared in scholarly journals including “Artibus et Historiae” and “Source,” as well as in the Ashgate Research Companion to Giorgio Vasari (2016). She co-edited the volume “Green Worlds in Early Modern Italy: Art and the Verdant Earth” (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), which includes her essay “Naturalism and Antiquity, Redefined, in Vasari’s Verzure.”
As department chair, Goodchild oversaw the planning of the new Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Art Center at Wofford, and has helped launch the college’s first-ever studio art major. She also guides and oversees all advanced independent research in art history.
Committed to gender equity, Goodchild is the co-founder of Wofford’s Gender Studies Program and, recently, Wofford’s Women in Leadership Initiative.