Dr Stephanie O'Rourke
Senior Lecturer in Art History
- Phone
- +44 (0)1334 46 2358
- so38@st-andrews.ac.uk
Biography
BA Harvard University (2008), PhD Columbia University (2016)
Research areas
Stephanie O'Rourke is a historian of European art particularly in relation to resource extraction, scientific knowledge, and media technologies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She also collaborates with artists and climate scientists to explore landscapes of extraction in the present day.
Recent publications explore: art and infrastructure in nineteenth-century Britain (); resource extraction and German romanticism (); deep time and Caspar David Friedrich (); electricity and art during the French Revolution (); and the role of race and gender in Enlightenment knowledge-production (, ).
Her second book (University of Chicago Press, 2025) examines how artistic production responded to and helped to shape the rise of extractive capitalism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Multi-national in its scope, this book explores how European landscapes pictured the natural environment in relation to specific extractive industries such as mining and timber harvesting as well as emerging concepts about race, climate, and waste operative within the continent and its colonial networks.
Dr O'Rourke's first book (; winner of the BARS First Book Prize) focuses on the relationship between art and the production of scientific knowledge at the dawn of the nineteenth century. It reveals some of the ways that artworks were critical actors in a larger epistemological transformation taking place at the twilight of European Enlightenment.
Dr O'Rourke has been a professeur invité at the Sorbonne in Paris (2024) and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (2026). Her work has been supported by a Paul Mellon Centre Mid-Career Fellowship (2026), a Saltire Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2022), and a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2020). She has received additional grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Yale Center for British Art, the Royal Academy, the Association for Art History, the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, and elsewhere. From 2013-14 she was a Mellon-funded research fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, where she worked primarily on the exhibition 'Degas: A Strange New Beauty' (2016).
PhD supervision
- Beatrice Spengou
- Ingrid Steiner
- Camille Wilson
Selected publications
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Open access
O'Rourke, S. & Presutti, K., 1 Feb 2026, Online : Journal18.
Research output: Other contribution
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O'Rourke, S., 1 Nov 2025, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 240 p.
Research output: Book/Report › Book
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O'Rourke, S., 10 Jun 2024, Apollo - The International Art Magazine, 199, 731, p. 60-67.
Research output: Contribution to specialist publication › Article
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Open access
O'Rourke, S., 1 Feb 2024, Journal18.
Research output: Contribution to specialist publication › Article
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Open access
O'Rourke, S., 24 May 2024, In: Nonsite. 46
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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O'Rourke, S., 21 Aug 2024, Art UK.
Research output: Contribution to specialist publication › Article
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O'Rourke, S., 1 Apr 2023, In: H-France. 23, 72, p. 1-5
Research output: Contribution to journal › Book/Film/Article review
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Open access
O'Rourke, S., 25 Jul 2022, In: European Romantic Review. 33, 4, p. 497-513 17 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Open access
O'Rourke, S. (Editor) & Blair, S. (Editor), 1 Apr 2022, In: Journal18. 13
Research output: Contribution to journal › Special issue › peer-review
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O'Rourke, S., 14 Sept 2022, Porträts in Serie: Reihung und Vervielfältigung als Mittel von Argumentation in Geschichte, Kunst und Literatur. Freyer, S., Niehr, K. & Schmitt-Maaß, S. (eds.). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, p. 165-188 (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen; vol. 171).
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter