Professor Maura Coughlin's research in ecocritical approaches to art history is gaining recognition and momentum worldwide, helping her to ascend towards the top of a new, exciting field in art history. Thanks to Coughlin’s scholarship and teaching, it's also a field that Bryant students are able to learn from, developing critical skills and knowledge while exploring the climate crisis, one of the most pressing problems of today.
An in-demand perspective
Experts around the world are eager to hear her rich perspective. In October she presented at Oxford University in England, after being invited by scholars there to give a talk in its Long Nineteenth Century Seminar series, attended mostly by members of the history community at Oxford.
The ecocritical lecture, “Extracting the last fish: North Atlantic peripheries in French Visual Culture c. 1900,” came from her current scholarship, highlighting visual representation of North Atlantic fishing communities and the seemingly limitless abundance of codfish in the past. In the talk, she points to Gaston Roullet’s colonial propaganda panorama of 1900 from the Paris World's Fair, “Working on the drying grounds of Saint-Pierre,” a painting that depicts the salt cod drying beaches of St. Pierre and Miquelon, a tiny archipelago off the coast of Newfoundland.
“Bigger than the story of one painting, it's a story about using up natural resources. It’s a global story about production and consumption, labor and human rights.”
For her, the panorama “is a way of thinking about the oceans as an extraction site, propagandized as being abundant and inexhaustible, when in fact, by about 1900, it was already pretty wiped out,” explains Coughlin. “Bigger than the story of one painting, it's a story about using up natural resources, and it’s a global story about production and consumption, labor and human rights.”
She was also asked to participate in a March series of workshops by the Vienna Anthropocene Group, a collaboration between the University of Vienna and the University of Edinburgh, alongside other top scholars who work at the intersection of ecocriticism and art history, several of whom she met previously as fellow presenters at Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective, an international symposium (and now a recent published book) that was hosted by the Princeton University Art Museum.
This is on top of positive reception by scholars and demand for her book, Ecocriticism and The Anthropocene in Nineteenth Century Art and Visual Culture (Routledge). Co-edited by Coughlin and Emily Gephart, Ph.D., a lecturer of visual studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, the book investigates aspects of 19th century art and visual culture—or mass culture—through the lens of the environment.
Her Environmental Humanities course explores environmental issues through fiction, nonfiction, art, film, history, natural history and more, and discusses the power of creative expression to make change in the world.
“There was nothing like this book that existed out there. We're living in a climate crisis, and the book takes us back to the 19th century origins of those problems,” says Coughlin of the book's success. They've even received invites to classrooms from Alberta to Austria to discuss the book with students reading the text.
Inspiration in the classroom
Her students benefit from her perspectives as well, including in her Introduction to the Environmental Humanities class, where students think across disciplines as they discuss environmental issues through fiction, nonfiction, art, film, history, natural history and more, and explore the power of creative expression to make change in the world.
"So that there's something left for the next generation, it's important to think about the ethics of consumption. And students can do that through this course,” says Coughlin.
“A lot of students have some idea of the climate crisis when they start taking the class, but through the course, they really expand their knowledge base.”
“For example, we’re looking at the carbon footprint of fast fashion right now, and taking it all the way back to the 18th century history of growing cotton and industrial agriculture; others are looking at deforestation, plastics in the ocean, coral bleaching, animal extinction, environmental racism—many important topics.” And it’s making an impact.
“A lot of students have some idea of the climate crisis when they start taking the class, but through the course, they really expand their knowledge base. They say to me, ‘I don't understand why I was never taught any of this before.’ And some say, ‘I think I really have to do something and use my major to deal with this problem.’”
“That’s why we teach this information; our students, as world citizens and future managers in their fields, need an understanding of the climate crisis and sustainability."
