ODSECS 34: Stephanie O'Rourke

Upside Down: Mining the Late Eighteenth-Century Landscape

Abstract: This paper moves across the visual culture of mining infrastructure and volcanic eruptions to explore the emergence of a newly “extractive” way of picturing landscape in late eighteenth-century Europe. Moving across examples from Germany, France, and Britain, I explore how these images encoded emerging ideas about waste, natural resources, verticality, and circulation that would become core to the protocols of extractive capitalism.

Bio: Stephanie is a historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual culture in Europe and its colonial networks, particularly in relation to scientific knowledge, environmental history, and media technologies. She is a Senior Lecturer in art history at the University of St Andrews