Alice Dodds
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity
Cultures of ecotechnology
Biography
I am an art historian specialising in ecocritical and intellectual histories of nineteenth and twentieth century English art. Currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity and the Department of English, I work on the cultural history of ecotechnology in British modernist art criticism. Prior to coming to York, my AHRC/CHASE-funded doctoral research at the Courtauld Institute of Art reconstructed an environmental tradition of utopian thought in the work of English craftswomen between 1880 and 1940.
Research
My research sits within LCAB’s ‘Ecotechnology and the Futures of Biodiversity’ project which explores how cultural histories of ecotechnology in the twentieth century sit alongside their representation in literary fiction, film, and other cultural texts.
Focussing on British art criticism before 1950, my research looks specifically at ‘biotechnics’ – a modernist theory of design that anticipated what we now call ‘biomimicry’. Considering how critics, scientists, artists, and designers came together in the modernist artistic press, the project examines how biotechnics was a response to, and proposed solution for, biodiversity change. Central to this is the role of criticism and visual culture in constructing the value systems that determined which living things were thought useful, beautiful, or worth protecting, and which were overlooked, asking which biodiversities the British artistic press put before us, and which it discarded.