Felicia Marlene Else

Felicia Else has been pursuing research on water, art, cartography, natural history and festivals in 16^th-century Florence, including the well-known Neptune Fountain in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence by Bartolomeo Ammannati. She is the author of The Politics of Water in the Art and Festival of Medici Florence: from Neptune Fountain to Naumachia (Routledge, 2019) and has published articles in Burlington Magazine, Sixteenth Century Journal, Imago Mundi and Sculpture Journal. She has contributed academic publications on water and wine fountains, pufferfish in the Renaissance and artistic representations of naval battles and water management. She is a co-editor and contributor to Giants and Dwarfs in European Art & Culture, c. 1350-1700: Real, Imagined, Metaphorical for Monsters and Marvels. Alterity in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (Amsterdam University Press).

Her teaching draws on her passion for art, history and study abroad. She served as the Resident Director for the Gettysburg College Study Abroad Program in England, leading an onsite course in London on Museums, Repatriation and Decolonization. Her courses cover art from Antiquity to the Baroque. She has helped students curate exhibitions in the Schmucker Art Gallery, including two inspired by Renaissance curiosity cabinets, “The Gettysburg Cabinet” (2012 at https://wonder-cabinet.sites.gettysburg.edu/2012/ and “Wonders of Nature and Artifice” (2017 at https://wonder-cabinet.sites.gettysburg.edu/2017/). Others include prints from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries in "Artful Nature and the Legacy of Maria Sibylla Merian" (2019 at https://wonder-cabinet.sites.gettysburg.edu/artful-nature/), "The Plains of Mars: European War Prints, 1500-1825" and "A Portrait of the Artist, 1525-1825" with additional material at https://schmucker-art-gallery.sites.gettysburg.edu/a-portrait-of-the-artist/?kubio-preview=saved&kubio-random=ZqpyNDUN4-UGLy4Sd7xa. She has promoted the use digital technology in art history, directing student research in the development of dynamic websites on Renaissance works in Gettysburg College's Special Collections, including sites by Daniella Snyder '18 on a 17th century Dutch World Map at http://daniellasnyder.sites.gettysburg.edu/maps_as_art/ and Sophia Gravenstein '22 on a Portrait of Martin Luther by the Workshop of Lucas Crananch the Younger at https://special-collections.sites.gettysburg.edu/martin-luther/gettysburg-colleges-luther/.