Carol Bird Ravenal

Carol Bird Myers Ravenal was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1926 and received her PhD in Art History from Harvard University in 1963. Dr. Ravenal is Professor Emerita at American University, where she taught art history, art education, studio, and design from 1968 to 1997, after teaching previously at the Rhode Island School of Design and Rhode Island College. She took courses in psychoanalysis and met regularly for five years with Division 39-Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association. She has presented and written numerous lectures and articles, including “Matisse: Love as Art” in the Annual of Psychoanalysis (November 1995). Dr. Ravenal has been a member of the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA) since 1985 and served as the IPA’s Vice-President. Together with Mary Coleman, for some years starting in the 1980s, they organized a psychohistory group in Washington, DC. As a painter in acrylic, she has shown in over 40 solo and group exhibits throughout the United States and abroad. Among her many awards and honors are the Sears-Gilbert Radcliffe Fellowship, the first woman to receive the Harvard Paul J. Sachs Traveling Fellowship, an American University Summer Research Fellowship, a Scandinavian Summer Fellowship, president of Phi Kappa Phi, and member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 2009 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn College Alumni Association. Dr. Ravenal lives with her husband, Earl, in Washington, DC, and at Wilderness Farm in Talbot County, Maryland. Some of her paintings may be viewed at www.flickr.com/photos/carolravenal/ and she may be contacted at . A detailed question-and-answer dialogue by e-mail in summer 2011 with Bob Lentz resulted in a self-narrative for the Makers of Psychohistory Research Project, excerpts from which follow.