ARTH 503
Clark Visiting Professor Seminar: Transatlantic Landscape Spring 2024
Division I
Cross-listed
This is not the current course catalog

Landscape and the American encounter are inextricably bound together. Through the conventions of landscape representation and cartography developed in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries, previously unknown regions of the globe were made legible to European audiences. What were these conventions? What aesthetic, social, and political factors contributed to their development? And with what success were they carried across the Atlantic? If European landscape was an agent of empire, in what ways was it challenged and even transformed by encounters with people whose ways of experiencing and thinking with the land did not conform to its conventions? This seminar will explore such questions by investigating the historiography and theory of landscape, and by looking closely at a number of case studies in transatlantic landscape, including the sixteenth-century mapping of New Spain, the Dutch representation of Brazil in the seventeenth century, Caribbean landscapes, the representation of the arctic, early archaeological campaigns in North America, and the surveying and representation of the western United States in the nineteenth century.