The 46th International Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies was hosted by the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, on November 22-24, 2019. I gave a talk as a panelist in a session on “The Photographic Construction of Mountains” called “The Power of Collective Vision: Landscape, Visual Media, and the Production of American Mountains.”
Back to all Speaking Engagements
The Power of Collective Vision: Landscape, Visual Media, and the Production of American Mountains
Conference Theme
The theme of the conference was was “Mediating Mountains.”
Mountains confront us in many guises. They visualize space and provide geopolitical orientations that address questions of historical, cultural, social, national, and individual identity. Mountains are subjects of philosophical reflections, environmental meditations, and ecocritical ontologies. They serve as means of spiritual invigoration, scientific experimentation, medical therapy, and recreation. They are also the sources and resources of technological and artistic innovations, of human and nonhuman exploitations. Mountain spaces are often borderlands and contested zones of war and migration. They are sites of tourism and industrialization, deposits of waste, and repositories of cultural memory….
The conference “Mediating Mountains” set out to explore mountains as objects and agents of mediation in all artforms and media, including painting, literature, theater, music, film, television, performance and video art, video gaming, photography, and architecture.
Related Publications
Article in the Journal of Cultural Geography
Building on my conference presentation, I developed the paper into an article of the same name published in the Journal of Cultural Geography in 2021. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard's theory of simulation, the article traces how visual media have shaped a collective vision of American mountains and argues that this process has influenced the ways mountains have been colonized, nationalized, and understood in the United States.
Read the Article
Book Review in the Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies
In 2021, the Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies published a special issue called "Mediating Mountains," inspired by the conference theme and edited by Eva-Maria Müller and Christian Quendler. I contributed a review of Uplift: Visual Culture at the Banff School of Fine Arts by PearlAnn Reichwein and Karen Wall (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Read the Issue