Environmental Approaches to the Eastern Mediterranean Landscape, 1750-1920

For centuries, the territories of the eastern Mediterranean were home to the ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse communities that comprised the Ottoman Empire. These territories simultaneously served as travel destinations for artists, antiquarians, and archaeologists seeking out the region’s ancient ruins, Biblical heritage, and ‘Orientalist’ exoticism. For insiders and outsiders to the region alike, the land of the eastern Mediterranean itself had long been a site of significance, whether as contested territory in trans-imperial and nationalist conflict or as the source of valuable commodities, whether antiquities, agricultural products, or geological matter. While scholars have explored travellers’ desire to assimilate the region into sublime or picturesque frameworks, there has been less critical study of how the region’s landscapes have been represented visually, particularly in the case of vernacular image-making traditions. Art and visual culture witness the complex ways that human labour and territorialization shaped the eastern Mediterranean through a broad array of cultural and aesthetic tropes pertaining to land, landscape, and ‘nature’.

We invite papers that approach artistic representations of eastern Mediterranean landscapes through an environmental lens, focusing on the period 1750-1920. The panel invites papers on topics including but not limited to: micro-ecologies; animal-human relations; agricultural labour and resistance; agroecological continuity/transformation; infrastructural/industrial impacts on landscape (e.g. railways, urbanisation); intersections of extractive practices (e.g. mining, archaeology); state/private/common land ownership; territories contested by local/national/imperial actors; landscape and tourism; landscapes as sites for mythology and history; (dis)continuities between ancient and modern land use; rivers, coasts, deserts, mountains; and images which conform/subvert pastoral/picturesque/sublime tropes.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Dr Sebastian Marshall, University of St Andrews, sam66@st-andrews.ac.uk

Dr Alexandra Solovyev, School of Advanced Study, University of London, alexandra.solovyev@sas.ac.uk