Senior Lecturer, School of Art History
Biography
Dr O’Rourke’s forthcoming second book, Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction (University of Chicago Press, 2025) argues that ‘picturing landscape’ was the primary means through which European artists grappled with an enormous transformation in how humans relate to the natural world, characterized by the management and extraction of “natural resources” on an unprecedented scale and within a global network. 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. A portion of the manuscript on Caspar David Friedrich and ‘deep time’ was published in Representations. Her prize-winning first book (Art, Science and the Body in Early Romanticism, Cambridge University Press) examines the changing evidentiary authority of the human body at the dawn of the nineteenth century.
Dr O’Rourke regularly organizes conferences and events on nineteenth-century art, climate, and pollution. Her most recent conference, ‘Painting in Steam: Pollution, Climate, and Combustion in British Art’ (St Andrews, 2024) was sponsored by the Centre for Energy Ethics. Dr O’Rourke has also hosted two podcast series that feature interviews with historians and climate scientists about the past, present, and future of the Scottish and Irish landscapes. You can stream episodes of Enlightenment Rocks and Ireland’s Landscape Histories and Futures for free.
Finally, Dr O’Rourke works with contemporary artists whose work engages with energy, resource extraction, geology, and other natural phenomena.
Selected publications
“John Martin and the Art of Infrastructure,” nonsite.org 46 (May 2024). https://nonsite.org/john-martin-and-the-art-of-infrastructure
“Staring into the Abyss of Time,” Representations 148 (Fall 2019): 30-56.
“Searching for Selfhood in Romantic Landscape Painting,” Art History 44 no. 1 ( 2021), 197-99.
“Girodet’s Galvanized Bodies,” Art History 41 no. 5 (2018): 868-893.
