Giulia Smith

Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Ruskin School of Art and Worcester College, University of Oxford

Dr Giulia Smith specialises in modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on the legacies of Empire in Britain and across the Atlantic world. Her research focuses in particular on the eco-aesthetic and eco-poetic traditions of the transnational Caribbean in relation to Eurocentric, and especially British, conceptions of nature, landscape and ecology. Titled Living Landscapes: Biotic Resistance in the Transnational Caribbean, her current book project considers visual objects and literary texts produced in the second half of the twentieth century alongside contemporary artworks that mobilise geophysical entities and climatic phenomena in support of counter-hegemonic critiques of colonial and neo-colonial regimes of oppression and environmental exploitation. Preliminary publications relating to this research are forthcoming with Tate Publishing and in British Art Studies.

In 2020, she was awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant to organise an international workshop on ‘Art, Politics and Ecology in Modern Guyana’. The project expanded with the support of a Paul Mellon Centre Event Support Grant, jointly awarded to Dr Giulia Smith and Dr Kate Keohane, and is now scheduled to take place as part of a comprehensive research stream on ‘Biotic Resistance: Eco-Caribbean Visions in Art and Exhibition Practice’ (forthcoming at Oxford University in 202

The Ruskin School of Art - Giulia Smith (ox.ac.uk)

Dr Giulia Smith is a member of the Environmental Humanities Programme at TORCH