Member Profile
Name:
Dr Sebastian Marshall
Institution:
University of St Andrews
Academic status:
University/college academic
Main discipline:
Cultural Studies
Additional disciplines:
Art History
Cultural Studies
History
Literary Studies
Cultural Studies
History
Literary Studies
Other societies:
Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East
Research interests:
My research brings together approaches from cultural geography, the history of art and archaeology, and classical reception to study the rich corpus of sources produced by European travellers in the Mediterranean during the long nineteenth century. Above all, I am interested in the ways that powerful touristic discourses which continue to romanticise countries like Greece to this day can be traced back to these visual and textual accounts. With a particular focus on representations of landscapes, my work revisits travellers’ publications, archival papers, sketches, and photographs, to understand how their attempts to apprehend the Mediterranean past were mediated by the Mediterranean present. I have recently been working on publishing parts of my PhD, which explored the depiction of Greece and Anatolia in British illustrated books between 1832 and 1882. At St Andrews, my new Leverhulme Fellowship project asks what sources produced by outsiders to Greece tell us about human-nature relationships, in a time when ancient modes of land use and claims on the continuity of ‘ancient’ natural beauty came head-to-head with efforts to transform the country into a ‘developed’ European nation. The first part of this project examines the phenomenon of British ‘expats’ who purchased estates in Attica and Evia in the 1830s, tracing their investment – fiscal and cultural – in these landscapes.