From Landscape to Urban Humanities: Exploring Histories of Difference

In 2015, the Garden & Landscape Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks launched its first Urban Landscape Studies initiative to both expand scholarship from the garden to the urban scale and bring landscape history into a deeper dialogue with contemporary discourses in the humanities. This project engaged new topics including the study of rivers and river cities, food and the city, and an analysis of Olmsted's writings on slavery and the south, each challenging the boundaries of landscape history as a defined domain. This year we initiated a second phase of the initiative titled Democracy and the Urban Landscape: Race, Identify, and Difference. With this program we seek to develop new frameworks for urban landscape studies, engaging with questions of political ecology, critical race studies, and indigenous knowledge, among other related critical studies and questions. We are organizing fellowships, academic activities, and public programs around broadly conceived themes of the historic narratives of urban landscapes as democratic spaces and places where equity, justice, and inclusion are performed nationally and internationally. This project suggests how we are using our collections, both the gardens and library special collections, to identify new questions in the interstitial spaces between artifact, document, and place in the history of cultural readings of nature, land, and the natural. In turn, these projects bring new scholars to Dumbarton Oaks, including those whose questions focus on issues of race, identity, difference, and interpretation of plants, places, and lands.