Productions of Landscape: Space, Place and the Capital of Nature in California, 1848-1917.
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Nottingham
Department Name: American and Canadian Studies
Abstract
Using a new theoretical model of space and place in relation to landscape my PhD will argue that closer
cultural and economic engagement with non-human nature propelled California to modernity. From US
annexation in 1848 to the 1915 San Francisco world's fair, industrial practices and artistic expressions
increasingly exploited the environment not through reckless consumption but careful cultivation: capital
accumulation required it, and emerging conservationism advocated it. My MRes on northern Californian
literary landscapes from 1880-1917 outlines the space-place framework that my PhD expands into an
interdisciplinary, state-wide study. Using government reports, industrial studies, architecture plans, and
periodicals in addition to literature, my PhD treats landscapes as materialisations of environmental,
economic, and cultural forces. I intertwine these diverse sources by distilling their geographies into
formative structures (space) and physical locations (place).
cultural and economic engagement with non-human nature propelled California to modernity. From US
annexation in 1848 to the 1915 San Francisco world's fair, industrial practices and artistic expressions
increasingly exploited the environment not through reckless consumption but careful cultivation: capital
accumulation required it, and emerging conservationism advocated it. My MRes on northern Californian
literary landscapes from 1880-1917 outlines the space-place framework that my PhD expands into an
interdisciplinary, state-wide study. Using government reports, industrial studies, architecture plans, and
periodicals in addition to literature, my PhD treats landscapes as materialisations of environmental,
economic, and cultural forces. I intertwine these diverse sources by distilling their geographies into
formative structures (space) and physical locations (place).