Stephanie O'Rourke
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sorourke25.bsky.social
Stephanie O'Rourke
@sorourke25.bsky.social
Art Historian
'Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction 1780-1820' (Chicago 2025)
'Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism' (Cambridge 2021)

extraction and its visual cultures, dog videos, unions, knowledge systems, 19th-century literature
Headed to Binghamton this week to talk through material from my new book! 🤓
October 27, 2025 at 3:18 PM
Remarkable Guillaume Lethière show at the Louvre right now. Son of a white plantation owner and an enslaved woman of mixed race, Lethière was one of the most successful artists in early 19th-c France. Through the show a larger community of Caribbean artists in Paris comes into view as well.
December 12, 2024 at 3:33 PM
CFP: Romantic Shock and Surprise

Sorbonne Université, Paris, Friday 16 – Saturday 17 May 2025

full call here: www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=5530
November 29, 2024 at 1:50 PM
This Friday Katie Hornstein, Kelly Presutti, C.C. McKee, Maura Coughlin and I are talking about 'Keywords for Ecocriticism in Francophone Visual Culture of the Long Nineteenth Century' for H-France! (link below)
September 30, 2024 at 9:49 AM
CFP: The Geological Imagination in the Art of the Long Nineteenth Century
Huntington Library, California 4-5 April 2025
Details here: tinyurl.com/5byd6he6
May 15, 2024 at 2:40 PM
Painting in Steam
Please note this event begins at 2pm UK time, not 3pm as previously advertised.
My apologies for the error.
April 10, 2024 at 1:57 PM
My new book 'Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction, 1780-1850' will be published next year by the University of Chicago Press! It asks: how did various forms of picturing make the natural world assimilable to the protocols of extraction in Europe and its colonial networks?
February 23, 2024 at 10:01 AM
Speaking next Friday about John Martin and infrastructure for 'Rethinking Victorian Mediascapes' organized by my colleague Luke Gartlan -- looking forward to it!
January 18, 2024 at 10:02 AM
Although it's a "romantic" landscape, someone viewing this painting circa 1820 would have instantly recognized it as a modern, artificially planted, and highly managed woodland. In it, Friedrich portrays the beauty of the technocratic values of resource management.

Friedrich, Evening, c 1820
December 22, 2023 at 11:30 AM
Is it just me or does this 'scary' 'dragon' by Albrecht Aldorfer look like a goofy lil rooster
November 10, 2023 at 10:59 AM
just taught a week on the colonial and commercial history of pigments and suddenly this painting - with its Prussian blue and Indian Yellow - looks unfamiliar and interesting
November 10, 2023 at 10:47 AM
'Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism' is now out in paperback! This discount code, which is good for the next 12 months, offers 20% off.
Art history books are often prohibitively expensive, so I'm thrilled this is available at a more accessible price.
October 25, 2023 at 9:03 AM