Seeing Nature: The Environment in American Visual Culture to 1900

The 2016 CHAViC seminar will address environmental history through visual culture. Through workshops, lectures, and field trips participants will learn how to see history in nature and nature in history. The seminar is open to both beginning and senior scholars across multiple disciplines.

Seminar participants will together explore American environmental history as a way to understand evolving cultural, social, racial, gender, public health and economic ideologies in early America. Participants will have the opportunity to learn from the extraordinary collections at AAS, including prints, political cartoons, photographs, book illustrations, agricultural journals, newspapers, periodicals, and ephemera of all kinds. Topics will include ideas of culture and nature in representations of animals, forests, rivers, agricultural and pastoral landscapes, cities, industrial sites, parks, and the rural cemetery movement. A field trip to the Harvard Forest and Fisher Museum in Petersham, MA, is planned.

Faculty

Seminar co-leaders will be Kathryn Morse, Professor and Chair, Department of History, John C. Elder Professor in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, and Jon T. Coleman, Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Notre Dame.