Landscape and Ecology

Landscape and Ecology:

Kelly Presutti and Greg Thomas in Conversation

ONLINE

10 April 2025

7 am (PDT) / 10 am (EDT) / 3 pm (BST) /

4 pm (CEST)

Please join us for this discussion of landscape painting, politics, and ecocritical methodologies.

Kelly Presutti’s Land into Landscape Art, Environment, and the Making of Modern France (Yale 2025) explores shifting landscapes—both real and represented—in nineteenth-century France and the role of images in both picturing and producing those shifts. Interrogating the relationship between land and landscape, this engaging study examines the role landscape depictions played in the formation of modern France and reveals how art and visual culture contributed to the physical and symbolic shaping of the nation. Kelly will be in discussion with Greg Thomas, whose many important publications on nineteenth-century landscape painting have considered the potential of art as form of ecocriticism.

REGISTRATION

The online conversation will take place on Thursday 10 April 2025 at
7 am (PST) / 10 am (EST) / 3 pm (GMT) / 4 pm (CEST).

This webinar is free and open to all, but registration is required as space is limited.

Please click the button below to register for the event. You will receive a Zoom link to the email address you provide when registering. The Zoom link will be shared on 8 April 2025.

BIOGRAPHY

Kelly Presutti is assistant professor at Cornell University where she teaches courses in modern western art and the environmental humanities. Her first book, Land into Landscape: Art, Environment, and the Making of Modern France, considers the role of art and visual culture in the physical and symbolic reshaping of France’s ground. A new project looks to the art and object collections of the French navy, attending especially to stories of failure, weakness, and defeat to illuminate the surprising role disaster played in the formation of an imperial maritime identity.

Greg Thomas is a Professor of art history at The University of Hong Kong. A specialist in 19th-century French art, he has published Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau (Princeton UP, 2000) and Impressionist Children: Childhood, Family, and Modern Identity in French Art (Yale UP, 2010), along with articles on landscape, ecology, and Impressionism. He has also published extensively on artistic interactions between Europe and China in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The conversation will be chaired by Allison Deutsch.