Cultural and Historical Geography

Cultures of Landscape

Research in this field has demonstrated the potential of cultural and historical geography to reshape the wider intellectual agenda in the humanities. The group’s standing in landscape research was reflected in 2005 in Stephen Daniels’ appointment as Director of the AHRC five-year programme in ‘Landscape and Environment’. Work by Stephen Daniels, David Matless, Charles Watkins and Susanne Seymour has explored the relationship between the design, representation and experience of landscape and the formation of personal, local, national and imperial identities in England from the 18th century to the present day. This longstanding English focus in work at Nottingham has been supplemented by Alex Vasudevan's research on the landscapes of contemporary photography, and on urban modernity in Berlin, and Special Lecturer Andrew Charlesworth's research on Holocaust landscapes. Studies have examined the work of key landscape artists, designers and theorists, including Uvedale Price, Nikolaus Pevsner, Jeff Wall and Paul Sandby, and demonstrated the ways in which specific sites or components of landscape – gardens, trees, buildings, rivers, camps, streets, pools - refract and exemplify the politics and poetics of landscape. Public understanding of academic scholarship has been advanced via exhibitions, broadcasts and publication, including the acclaimed 2004 ‘Art of the Garden’ exhibition at Tate Britain, co-curated by Stephen Daniels, visited by 100,000 people. Research by the group has extended the theoretical language of landscape though detailed empirical study, with the movement between theory and practice informing innovative research on animal landscapes, urban performance, and the geographical landscapes of sound and music. Future research initiatives include work on the cultures of landscape and liquidity, and studies of European landscape photography.