Enduring Colonialism: Empire and Landscape in Dialogue

We invited three renowned academics and authors who have written extensively about colonisation’s effects on the landscape in different parts of the world from varying perspectives.  They discussed and drew comparisons with how landscapes and buildings expressed empires’ power relationships and their enduring legacy, from conquest and dispossession, both in the colonies and the metropole.

The panellists were:

Professor Jill H Casid, a historian, theorist and practicing artist based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Her contributions to the transdisciplinary field of visual studies include Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005) and Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015).

Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA, Saree Makdisi is the author of Romantic Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (WW Norton, 2008) and Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

Professor Jane Ohlmeyer is Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History (1762) at Trinity College Dublin.  She is the author of Making Ireland English (Yale University Press, 2012) and is currently working on a book about Ireland, empire and the early modern world, the research of which is the basis of her Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford in 2021.

They were facilitated by Professor Corinne Fowler, Professor of Postcolonial Literature at the University of Leicester.  She also leads a project, Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted (Heritage Lottery and Arts Council), a child-led history and writing endeavour seeking to make UK historic houses’ connections to the East India Company and transatlantic slavery widely known and understood.  Her work includes, Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural Britain’s Colonial Histories (Peepal Tree Press, 2020), Chasing Tales: Travel Writing, Journalism and the History of British Ideas about Afghanistan (Rodopi, 2008) and is co-author of Postcolonial Manchester: Diaspora Space and the Devolution of Literary Culture (MUP, 2013).