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

Stephanie O'Rourke is a historian of European art particularly in relation to resource extraction, scientific knowledge, and media technologies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She also collaborates with artists and climate scientists to explore landscapes of extraction in the present day. 

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). 

Her second book Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction (University of Chicago Press, 2025) 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.

Dr O'Rourke's 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. 

Dr O'Rourke has been a professeur invité at the Sorbonne in Paris (2024) and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (2026). Her work has been supported by a Paul Mellon Centre Mid-Career Fellowship (2026), a Saltire Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2022), and a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2020). She has received additional 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 she was a Mellon-funded research fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, where she worked primarily on the exhibition 'Degas: A Strange New Beauty' (2016).

PhD supervision

  • Beatrice Spengou
  • Ingrid Steiner
  • Camille Wilson

Selected publications

 

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