Amy Woodson-Boulton

Professor of History

  • Los Angeles CA UNITED STATES

Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts

Contact

Biography

Amy Woodson-Boulton is professor of British and Irish history and past chair of the Department of History at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. She holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley and an M.A. and Ph.D from UCLA. Her work concentrates on cultural reactions to industrialization in Britain, particularly the history of museums, the social role of art, and the changing status and meaning of art and nature in modern society. Published work includes articles and book chapters as well as her monograph Transformative Beauty: Art Museums in Industrial Britain (Stanford, 2012) and a volume that she coedited with Minsoo Kang, Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830–1914: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation (Routledge, 2008). She is currently working on a book-length study of ideas about “primitive art” in anthropology and art criticism, tentatively titled Explaining Art: Nature, Authentic Culture, and the Search for Origins in the Age of Empire. She teaches courses on British, Irish, modern European, imperial, and global history, with a focus on museum studies and cultural, public, and environmental history. She has presented to numerous scholarly and community groups, including work on the history of art and anthropology museums, the legacy of John Ruskin, and the environmental crises of plastics and climate change.

Education

University of California at Los Angeles

Ph.D.

History

2003

University of California at Los Angeles

M.A.

History

1999

University of California at Berkeley

B.A

History

1994

Social

Areas of Expertise

Environmental History
British History
Anthropology
Imperialism
Museum Studies
Art History
European History
History

Accomplishments

Elected Companion of the Guild of St. George

2016-04-08

Driven by his deep faith in social justice, John Ruskin established the Guild of St George in the 1870s to right some of the social wrongs of the day and make England a happier and more beautiful place in which to live and work. More active than ever before, we continue to promote the value of art, craftsmanship and a sustainable rural economy, putting Ruskin's ideas into practice in the 21st century.

http://www.guildofstgeorge.org.uk/

Affiliations

  • North American Victorian Studies Association
  • Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies
  • North American Conference on British Studies
  • Advisory Board, Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States

Sample Talks

Ruskin and the Plastic Crisis, Or “Modern Manufacture and Design,” 2022

Plastic is now evidence in the rock strata for the Anthropocene as a geological epoch and embodies multiple aspects of our current crises: our disposable economy, reliance on fossil fuels, rapidly changing climate, and the unevenly distributed toxic effects at all stages of plastic’s production, use, and disposal. Now that microplastics are everywhere from the air to the ocean to human blood, Ruskin’s sense of both “modern manufacture” and the “storm-cloud” of uncontrolled production and pollution has taken on new meaning. Thinking about Ruskin and plastic together can give us ideas and materials for thinking through the intertwined problems of systemic racism, mass production, hidden costs, art and design, and extractive economies.
https://youtu.be/hLsx9H6GqZ4

Courses

Art and Power

First Year Seminar

Modern Global Environmental History

This lower-division history course covers modern global history, c. 1500 to the present, with a particular focus on environmental history, exploring how humans, animals, natural forces, and science and technology have shaped the environment; the ways in which historical developments such as migration, empire, trade, industrialization, and urbanization have affected humans’ relationships with nature; and how the environment has affected historical developments. Students will consider a wide variety of economic, political, and cultural conceptions of – and relationships with – environments, animals, and “nature.”

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Power and Privilege in Modern European History

Lower-division history survey

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Articles

“Teaching Modern World History, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Urgency of Climate Change”

World History Connected

Elizabeth Drummond and Amy Woodson-Boulton

2021-06-01

https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/18.2/pdfs/04_WHC_18_2_Drummond.pdf

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“Totems, Cannibals, and Other Blood Relations: Animals and the Rise of Social Evolutionary Theory”

Victorian Review

2020-10-01

“Totems, Cannibals, and Other Blood Relations: Animals and the Rise of Social Evolutionary Theory,” Victorian Review 46/2 (Fall 2020): 211-234

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"‘The natives have a decided feeling for form’: Oceania, ‘Primitive Art,’ and the Illusion of Simplicity"

South Seas Encounters: Nineteenth-Century Oceania, Britain and America

ed. Richard Fulton, Peter Hoffenberg, Stephen Hancock, and Allison Paynter (New York: Routledge, 2018), 15-36

2018-08-01

Part of The Nineteenth Century Series

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