Dr Stephanie O'Rourke

Dr Stephanie O'Rourke

Senior Lecturer in Art History

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2358
Email
so38@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Biography

BA Harvard University (2008), PhD Columbia University (2016)

Research areas

I am a scholar of European visual culture, particularly in relation to resource extraction, scientific knowledge, and media technologies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My publications on this can be found in Representations, Art History, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal18 and elsewhere. 

My recent publications have explored: art and infrastructure in nineteenth-century Britain (nonsite); resource extraction and German romanticism (Apollo Magazine); and race in eighteenth-century French art (journal18). 

My second book, Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press. It argues that 'picturing landscape' was the primary means through which European artists grappled with an enormous transformation in how humans relate to the natural world, characterized by the management and extraction of “natural resources” on an unprecedented scale and within a global network. Multi-national in its scope, this book explores how European landscapes pictured the natural environment in relation to specific extractive industries such as mining and timber harvesting as well as emerging concepts about race, climate, and waste operative within the continent and its colonial networks.

My book (Art, Science and the Body in Early Romanticism, Cambridge University Press; winner of the BARS First Book Prize) examines the relationship between art and the production of scientific knowledge at the dawn of the nineteenth century. It reveals some of the ways that artworks were critical actors in a larger epistemological transformation taking place at the twilight of European Enlightenment. A recent article, "Art after Self Evidence," reflects specifically on the status of race and gender in this shift.

I regularly collaborate with artists, curators, and climate scientists to explore alternative strategies for visualising environmental change in the present day. Building upon previous work with multi-media artists and museums, I am developing a collaborative project on how to visualise the continued presence of coal-powered energy for the broader public.

In 2024 I will be an "invited professor" at the Sorbonne in Paris. I was recently a Saltire Fellow at the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2022) and previously held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2020). My research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Yale Center for British Art, the Royal Academy, the Association for Art History, the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, and elsewhere. From 2013-14 I was a Mellon-funded research fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, where I worked primarily on the exhibition 'Degas: A Strange New Beauty' (2016).

PhD supervision

  • Ingrid Steiner
  • Beatrice Spengou

Selected publications

 

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