Cosponsored by Oak Spring Garden Foundation and the Yale Center for British Art
Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a short biography by July 1, 2024, 5 pm ET.
The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and Oak Spring Garden Foundation (OSGF) share a legacy of landscape study rooted in the collections of Paul and Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon. While the Mellons’ collecting practices differed, they both gathered significant materials in the history of British environments, horticulture, and landscapes. Notable examples include Paul Mellon’s paintings and prints by George Stubbs and J. M. W. Turner and Bunny Mellon’s garden treatises and Humphrey Repton Red Books. From these origins, the YCBA’s extensive collection of British art has encouraged generations of new scholarship on British landscape art, while OSGF has become a leading research institution for the global histories and futures of gardens, landscapes, and plants. Inspired by this legacy of collecting and scholarship, the YCBA and OSGF are hosting a symposium at Yale to bring together new interdisciplinary research on British landscape studies.
By commingling the diversity of approaches to the histories and depictions of landscapes and environments represented by the two institutions, this symposium aims to generate new scholarly conversation about the intersections of British culture, ecology, and land.
We invite papers exploring new topics in the study of British landscapes, from art history to cultural geography to environmental studies, and we particularly welcome work exploring the relationship of cultural output to physical landscapes and ecologies. We encourage broad definitions of “landscape” and “British” to open the potential for discussions of the global context of Britain and its former empire, and to consider an international exchange of landscape art, design, and horticulture.
Proposed subjects might include, but are not limited to:
- Extractive, industrial, urban, and neglected landscapes
- Histories of collecting and display (whether art or plants)
- Interconnections of landscape and garden history and art history
- New critical approaches to environments, landscapes, and British identity
- Plant history and humanities broadly, including related subjects such as food history and agrarian history
Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a short biography by July 1, 2024, 5 pm ET.
This symposium will take place on December 5–6, 2024.
The YCBA will provide travel and accommodations for successful applicants.
For more information, please email sarah.leonard@yale.edu.