Dr Sebastian Marshall

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Researcher profile

Email
sam66@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Research areas

My research brings together approaches from cultural geography, the history of art and archaeology, and classical reception to study the rich corpus of sources produced by European travellers to the Mediterranean in the long nineteenth century. Above all, I am interested in the ways that powerful touristic discourses which continue to romanticise countries like Greece can be traced back to these visual and textual accounts. With a particular focus on representations of landscapes, my work revisits travellers’ publications, archival papers, sketches, and photographs, to understand how their attempts to apprehend the Mediterranean past were mediated by the Mediterranean present.

My PhD approached this subject by exploring the depiction of Greece and Anatolia in British illustrated books between 1832 and 1882. At St Andrews, my Leverhulme Fellowship project asks what sources produced by outsiders to Greece tell us about human-nature relationships, in a time when ancient modes of land use and claims on the continuity of ‘ancient’ natural beauty came head-to-head with efforts to transform the country into a ‘developed’ European nation. The first part of this project examines the phenomenon of foreign residents who purchased estates in Greece in the 1830s, tracing their investment – fiscal and cultural – in these landscapes.

Selected publications

 

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