Gayle L. Goudy asks why the world is the way it is — whether she’s questioning the built environment, the design of everyday objects, religious practice, or the beliefs we build our lives around. She holds a Ph.D. in Art & Architectural History from the University of Oregon and currently teaches Christian Art Appreciation at Charleston Southern University.
Growing up, Dr. Goudy was taught that the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean were extinct — a narrative at odds with her own family's oral tradition of Taíno descent, later confirmed by DNA. Her essay "Holding Hands with Erased Ancestors," to be presented this October, Dr. Goudy examines how the Gullah community of Charleston reclaimed and memorialized their African-American ancestors through Stephen Hayes's Anson Street fountain alongside her own family history, arguing that "extinction" is often less a fact than a story imposed by those who erased a people's records in the first place, and that such erasures can be undone, symbolically and materially, through naming, remembering, and reconnection. It's work she hopes to carry forward: helping communities recover histories dismissed as lost and making that recovery visible to those still living with silence.
Dr. Goudy has spent her career teaching art and architectural history at colleges and universities across the country. She is the author of Introduction to Architectural History: Understanding the Building Next Door (Kendall Hunt, 2019), with chapters in Design Beyond the Canon (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), and Labor Pains: The Art and Politics of Reproductive and Domestic Work (Routledge, forthcoming).