Nineteenth-Century Environments

This seminar will explore the representation of environments, broadly understood and primarily in Europe in the long nineteenth century, a period that witnessed the advent of an industrial age during which irreversible environmental degradation was set in motion. Focusing on the depiction of such entities as earth, rock, trees, plants, rivers, steam, pollution, ice, snow, wind, and mist, we will examine the ways in which artists construed the affective and material agency of the natural world. Readings will be drawn from the rich body of scholarship that engages ecocritical lenses of analysis. Students’ research paper topics may fall within or outside of the chronological and/or geographic scope of the course.

A concentrated study of a specific topic in art history.
May be repeated for credit if content varies.
Prerequisite: Consent of instructor.