Dr Stephanie O'Rourke

Dr Stephanie O'Rourke

Senior Lecturer in Art History

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2358
Email
so38@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Biography

BA Harvard University (2008), PhD Columbia University (2016)

Research areas

I am a historian of European art particularly in relation to resource extraction, scientific knowledge, and media technologies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

My recent publications explore: art and infrastructure in nineteenth-century Britain (nonsite); resource extraction and German romanticism (Apollo Magazine); deep time and Caspar David Friedrich (Representations); electricity and art during the French Revolution (Art History); and the role of race and gender in Enlightenment knowledge-production (Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal18). 

My second book, Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction (November 2025, University of Chicago Press), examines how artistic production responded to and helped to shape the rise of extractive capitalism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Multi-national in its scope, this book explores how European landscapes pictured the natural environment in relation to specific extractive industries such as mining and timber harvesting as well as emerging concepts about race, climate, and waste operative within the continent and its colonial networks.

My first book (Art, Science and the Body in Early Romanticism, Cambridge University Press; winner of the BARS First Book Prize) focuses on the relationship between art and the production of scientific knowledge at the dawn of the nineteenth century. It reveals some of the ways that artworks were critical actors in a larger epistemological transformation taking place at the twilight of European Enlightenment. A recent article, "Art after Self Evidence," reflects specifically on the status of race and gender in this shift.

I regularly collaborate with artists, curators, and geologists to explore alternative strategies for visualising extractive processes in the present day. 

In 2024 I will be an "invited professor" at the Sorbonne in Paris. I was recently a Saltire Fellow at the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2022) and previously held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2020). My research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Yale Center for British Art, the Royal Academy, the Association for Art History, the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, and elsewhere. From 2013-14 I was a Mellon-funded research fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, where I worked primarily on the exhibition 'Degas: A Strange New Beauty' (2016).

PhD supervision

  • Lauren Robbins
  • Beatrice Spengou
  • Ingrid Steiner

Selected publications

 

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