Lindner Lecture: Landscapes of Dis-placement: Mining and Mapping the 19th-century British Empire

This lecture charts the emergence of new pictorial formats for representing landscape that derived from and accelerated industrial mineral extraction in Britain in the early nineteenth century. These formats, in turn, actively assimilated colonial environments in North America and India into a system of extractive capitalism through which Britain consolidated both economic and territorial power. In an alternative account of nineteenth-century landscape, this talk explores how various pictorial formats alternately enabled or disabled this process.

BIO:

Senior Lecturer Stephanie O’Rourke is a historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art--particularly in relation to resource extraction, scientific knowledge, and media technologies--at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. In 2024 she was a "professeur invité" at the Sorbonne in Paris and is currently a Mid-Career Fellow with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London.

She holds a BA from Harvard University (2008) and a PhD from Columbia University (2016). Her research has been supported by a Saltire Fellowship at the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2022) and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2020). She previously served as a Research Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, a Pierre and Tana Matisse Fellow at Columbia University, a Visiting Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, and an International Dissertation Research Fellow at the Social Science Research Council. She also is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Her book Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction: Europe and its Colonial Networks 1780-1850 (University of Chicago Press, 2025, awarded the BAVS Rosemary Mitchell Book Prize) charts how artistic production responded to and helped to shape the rise of extractive capitalism at the turn of the nineteenth century.