Bert Geyer
PhD Candidate: Art, Architecture, and Landscape in US Empire
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About
Bert Geyer studies the environmental aesthetics of modernity. His dissertation, "The Forester’s Sensorium: Perceiving the Forests of US Empire, 1848-1942," analyzes art, design, and forestry’s entwined interventions upon the forests of U.S. imperial peripheries in the Midwest, Caribbean, and Pacific. In so doing, it opens new contours of historiographic explanation by registering how normative imaginations of the forest were performatively mediated—not just through forest technics, markets, and imperial governance but also by things such as images, buildings, infrastructure, and temporal schemata.
Bert is a 2025-2026 Resident Graduate Scholar at the Institute for the Humanities. He recently presented at the Society for Architectural Historian’s Method Acts Workshop and his research has been supported by the Forest History Society. Bert has taught architectural history seminars at 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