Camera geologica: photography and the art of resource extraction

Monday 12 May 2025, Royal Holloway, 5:30pm. Book Here.

This lecture focuses on Jonas NT Becker’s “Better or Equal Use” series, which documents former coal mining sites in Appalachia redeveloped under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA). Becker prints his photographs using coal collected from the sites he documents, forging a connection between the mined material, the history it represents, and the photographs themselves. Becker's labour-intensive prints offer an entry point for exploring the relationship between aesthetics and extraction, with particular attention to the afterlives of mining. Accordingly, the lecture will explore the geological history of photography by analyzing the materiality of Becker’s carbon prints, with a focus on coal and gelatin.

Siobhan Angus works at the intersections of art history, media studies, and the environmental humanities. Her current research explores the visual culture of resource extraction with a focus on materiality, labour, and environmental justice. Angus is an assistant professor of media studies at Carleton University. She is the author of Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press 2024), awarded the 2024 Photography Network Book Prize, and her research has been published in Environmental Humanities, liquid blackness, and October.

An interdisciplinary seminar series on histories of the environmental movement, supported by Royal Holloway's AHRC-funded project, An Oral History of the Environmental Movement (OHEM) in partnership with the British Library, Friends of the Earth, The Wildlife Trusts and the Royal Geographical Society.

The seminars, hosted by the London Group of Historical Geographers at the Institute of Historical Research, take place on alternate tuesdays at 5:30pm UK time and are free and open to all. Advance booking is essential. All seminars are also available online.

For full details of the programme and booking links, click here

Planting Resistance: Botanical Legacies of the African Diaspora

Tuesday 28 May 2024, Kew Gardens, 6pm, in collaboration with the British Academy

In the 21st century, the expansion of large-scale industrial agriculture across tropical landscapes in the Americas is threatening an Afrodescendant food system that has long prioritized agro-biodiversity and agroecological practices. These practices emerged during the plantation era of transatlantic slavery, when the enslaved leveraged subsistence precarity for the right to food plots, independent production, and partial autonomy over their labour. Historical continuities connect this much-ignored food system to agricultural practices maintained to this day in many Afrodescendant farming communities. Places exemplified by the plants, cultural knowledge, and social memories of these communities can be considered biocultural refugia - extending a concept from European heritage landscapes to tropical environments in the Americas.

This lecture is a free event, open to all.

For further details and to reserve your place, see the booking link

Cultivating the Plant Humanities

Thursday 9 May 2024, Royal Holloway, Founders Lecture Theatre, 5:30pm

Dr Yota Batsaki is the Executive Director of Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard University research centre, museum and historic garden located in Washington DC. Her talk will describe the Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks as an example of how plant-focused projects and collections can stimulate research and public communication around humans, culture, and the environment.

This lecture is a free event organised by the Centre for GeoHumanities, and open to all.

To reserve your place, see the booking link

12 March 2024 - GeoHumanities Meets Victorian Studies

Tuesday 12 March 2024, Senate House Room 104, 2:00pm

This is a work-in-progress event in the Landscape Surgery series for postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers organised between the Centre for GeoHumanities and Royal Holloway’s Centre for Victorian Studies. The event is themed around mutual interests in the environmental humanities with four contributions by current and former researchers in Geography and English Departments arranged under the titles ‘Paper Worlds’ and ‘Planetary Ecologies’. The speakers are Yasmin Akhter (Royal Holloway), Frankie Kubicki (Dickens Museum), Briony Wickes (Royal Holloway) and Bergit Arends (Courtauld Institute).