Art and the Environment

Please join us on March 10 at 12PM ET for Art and the Environment, a Virtual Salon co-sponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) and the Dahesh Museum of Art. This online event is free and open to the public, but registration is required: http://tinyurl.com/art-and-environment

For this event, we are fortunate to host three scholars who will discuss this important area of nineteenth-century studies: Kelly Presutti (Moderator), Stephanie O’Rourke, and Marika Takanishi Knowles. Each will give a brief presentation on an object drawn from their research on art and the environment, followed by discussion and then a Q&A.  

Speaker Bios:

Kelly Presutti is Assistant Professor at Cornell University, where she teaches courses in art history and the environmental humanities. Her forthcoming book, Land into Landscape: Art, Environment, and the Making of Modern France, analyzes the active role representation played in both symbolically reconfiguring and physically reshaping France’s ground in the nineteenth century. Recent publications include “‘A Better Idea than the Best Constructed Charts’: Watercolor Views in Early British Hydrography,” (Grey Room, 2021), an analysis of a set of watercolor views of the French coastline commissioned by the British Admiralty, and “The Sèvres’ Service des Départements and the Anxiety of the Fragment,” (Word and Image, 2021).

Stephanie O’Rourke is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews. She specializes in exchanges between artistic production and scientific knowledge in 18th- and 19th-century Europe and its colonial networks. Her first book, Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism, examines the changing evidentiary authority of the human body at the turn of the nineteenth century. She is currently at work on a second book provisionally titled Picturing Natural Histories in an Age of Extraction, whose research has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She holds a BA from Harvard University and a PhD from Columbia University.  

Marika Takanishi Knowles is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews, where she researches and teaches French art of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. In addition to her monograph on seventeenth-century French art, Realism and Role-Play: The Human Figure in French Art from Callot to the Brothers Le Nain (2020), she has co-edited a special issue of Word & Image, ‘The French Fragment from Revolution to Belle Époque’ (2021). She has published on Ingres (Res), Degas (Word & Image), Nadar (Oxford Art Journal) and Manet (Word & Image). She is interested in the relationship between visual art and behavioral and affective social phenomena, which she explores through the comparative study of art, literature, and theatre.