PLATFORM Publishes John Davis on Landscape History Today and its Future

The assistant professor participated in a conversation with other emerging scholars and historians, talking about what it meant to do landscape-focused history today and what it might look like in the future.

PLATFORM Publishes John Davis on Landscape History Today and its Future

PLATFORM has published “Turning Towards Action in Landscape History,” a conversation between Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture John Davis, Charlotte Leib, Margot Lystra, and Pollyanna Rhee on the subject of landscape architecture history today and its future.

In 1999, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians published a special issue devoted to the field of landscape history at the start of a new century. In that issue, Dianne Harris argued that over the 1990s landscapes became “important documents for understanding the development of national, social, and personal identities” across political, ecological, and ideological questions. This broadening of the field that Harris identified over twenty years ago continues today. One of the central developments in landscape history, as Sonja Dümpelmann noted in an article for Landscape Research in 2011, was an affinity with environmental history. In this first of a series of two conversations on landscape history, four early-career scholars reflect on developments in the field and its institutional position over the course of their graduate educations and early careers. This will be, we hope, an opportunity to reflect on the stakes and concerns of the field and its future. 

Read more at PLATFORM