Environmental History

Time: 12:30pm to 2:00pm

Meeting Location: History Faculty, Merze Tate Room

Week 2 (2^nd May)

Ben Stemper, “The Nature of Utopia: The ecological foundations of Joseph Déjacque’s anarchist utopianism (c. 1850s)”

In 1858, the anarchist Joseph Déjacque began to serially publish his vision of a future anarchic utopia titled L’Humanisphère. He sketches a hyper-advanced future society free from want and coercion, where humanity and nature coexist harmoniously in an anarchist ecumenopolis. This obvious ecologism, however, rests on the foundations of a highly idiosyncratic ecological understanding of politics generally and utopia in particular. Drawing on the influences of Charles Fourier and Pierre Leroux, I aim to elaborate Déjacque’s utopianism, which emerged directly out of his understanding of nature and humanity’s position within it. Politics follows nature, not the other way around.

Week 3

Ashmolean Tour

(Details TBA)

Week 4 (16^th May)

Mim Pomerantz, “Ecological Automatism: Photography and Non-Human Creativity in Minotaure (1933-1939)”

The review Minotaure published its first issue in 1933, nine years after the poet and critic André Breton officially inaugurated the Surrealist movement with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). As Surrealism entered the 1930s, many members of the movement became increasingly critical of the promises of what Breton called “pure psychic automatism” (or creativity in the absence of consciousness) as the best method for generating creative impulses. One interest that emerged in response to the perceived shortcomings of “pure psychic automatism” was an increased consideration of plants, animals, and insects as creative agents. Many of the most important texts articulating these new notions of thought-in-nature were published in Minotaure. Such texts include Roger Caillois’ exploration of biomimicry in insects, Max Ernst’s probing of the mysteries of forests, and André Breton’s analysis of coral’s uneasy status between plant and mineral. These essays were all accompanied by photographic illustrations. This dissertation considers how ecological actors were assigned agency in Minotaure and how the accompanying photographs were marshaled as evidence of non-human creativity. 

Week 6 (30^th May)

Ruka Hussain, “Science, Ecology and Romanticism in George Catlin’s travelling ‘Indian Gallery’”

Over the course of five visits to the American West in the 1830s, George Catlin (b.1796) created a collection of Native American portraits and artifacts, which he toured using a range of performance strategies such as lectures and audience participation. While most scholarship focuses either on figurations of the ‘vanishing Indian’ in his paintings or the museological aspects of his gallery, my paper characterises Catlin’s work as occupying a point of juncture between European and American romanticism, and between literary/artistic Romantic movements and burgeoning scientific disciplines. I apply to visual culture the suggestion of Bruce Greenfield, who argues that American romantic literature, particularly Thoreau, provided imaginative ‘first contacts’ through which readers could ‘know’ the land. Catlin’s gallery, however, provided frontier simulations that were multi-sensorial, engaging a more embodied form of knowledge. I also develop the work of Richard Sha, who argues that Romanticism was linked with science via the role of the imagination. By considering the spatial-temporal experiences of particular forms of visual culture, I chart the ways in which Catlin’s gallery engaged (historical) imagination and sewed lines between ecology, anthropology, and history.