Betsy Prioleau

Betsy Prioleau is an author and cultural historian. She received her PhD in American Literature at Duke University, then taught English and world literature at Manhattan College where she was a tenured associate professor. She was a scholar in residence at New York University and taught cultural history at the New York University Liberal Studies Program. Besides essays and scholarly articles, she is the author of four books: Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love; Swoon: Great Seducers and Why Women Love Them; Circle of Eros: Sexuality in the Work of William Dean Howells; and most recently, Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Wall Street Journal Noteworthy Book. She lectures frequently on literature, women, and sexuality, and has appeared on such television shows as PBS “To the Contrary,” “The Open Mind,” and Arte Television. 

With Betsy’s new book release about the decadent and richly historical Gilded Age in New York City, she turned to us to redesign her former aging website to provoke the feeling of New York’s Gilded Age using Art Deco designs and rich colors using a more modern and expansible format.

Carol worked closely with Betsy to create a site that could transform by using Facebook posts as details about the new release are revealed. PhotoBlog articles leading up to the book release were posts on Instagram and reposted with text and links to her blog which shows the latest two posts on the homepage. On the homepage, more content was added with designed sections.