Bert Geyer
PhD Candidate: Art, Architecture, and Landscape in US Empire
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About
Broadly, I am interested in how art and design inform the perception and management of the ecology-economy nexus. Motivating this interest is a conviction that aesthetic analysis offers much in explicating the historical contingency of human understandings of, and interventions upon, their environments. Further, such research retains humanistic commitments as an opportunity to reflexively interrogate and theorize the normative constitution of self and world (i.e. who/what am I and what are my obligations to the world I inhabit?) both for historical actors and ourselves in the present.
My dissertation, “Perceiving the Forests of US Empire, 1848-1942," examines the aesthetic dimension of forestry from its mid-nineteenth century formalization as a transimperial applied science to newfangled ecological and actuarial assessments of forests ultimately upended by WWII, after which ecology took a cybernetic turn and Cold War geopolitics remade forestry’s imperial imperatives and institutions. While focusing upon the geography of US empire, especially the Midwest, Caribbean, and Philippines, such a topic is necessarily transimperial given the circulation and training of foresters across empires, US appropriation of formerly Spanish forestry bureaucracy, and the liberalization of commerce from prior mercantilism. Along the way, the project investigates such things as forestry’s inheritance of art historical neoclassicism, Filipino artist-foresters simultaneously contributing to botanical tomes and exhibiting on the World’s Fair circuit, and forestry proposals by landscape architects and urban planners. Analytically linking these artifacts and events is recursive interpretation of how they use the techne, media, and discourse of forestry to perceive and respond to, often with great disagreement amongst themselves, the long nineteenth century shift from imperial maintenance of the plantation economy toward facilitating greater exploitation of forests through liberal capitalism.
Through a Fulbright Award, I am conducting research in the Philippines for AY 26-27. Previously, I was a Resident Graduate Scholar at the Institute for the Humanities in AY 25-26. I have presented papers at the College Art Association and American Society for Environmental History conferences as well as at the Society for Architectural Historian’s Method Acts Workshop. Finally, I have taught various architectural history courses at UIC and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and sculpture studios at Chicago State University.
Education
2016 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
2013 BA, Rhodes College