At the 5th Annual Yale Postdoctoral Association Symposium, which took place on the Yale University campus on May 19, 2022, I gave a flash talk titled “The View from Mount Holyoke: A Persistent Vision of an Arcadian Landscape.”
Description: Mount Holyoke is a mountain destination located in a state park in Western Massachusetts. Visitors have been hiking to the summit to take in the views of the Connecticut River Valley below for over two centuries. I explore how observations and understandings of the geographic and environmental setting create a collective sense of space and how these understandings are impacted by the legacy of cultural movements in New England. I trace consistencies and shifts in the aspects of the view on which tourists of the nineteenth century and contemporary, twenty-first century visitors focus. My data include archival accounts of people writing about the view from Mount Holyoke in letters, memoirs, and guidebooks, as well as interviews with contemporary visitors. I describe what people see and do not see in the landscape from Mount Holyoke and argue that the denial of change is linked to the legacy of nineteenth-century New England Romanticism. The dominant conception of the valley remains that of an idyllic Arcadian landscape.
I was awarded the symposium’s Outstanding Oral Presentation Award in the flash talk category.