AIAH Early Career Research Award Recipients 2025

Remapping the Anthropocene is an interdisciplinary, bilateral research project that investigates how visual culture has shaped and reflected understandings of environmental change from the Romantic period to the present. Centred on the collaboration between scholars from the University of Melbourne and the Research Group Europäische Romantik oder Romantiken in Europa? at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the project brings together art historians, environmental humanities scholars, climate researchers and early career researchers to explore how images have contributed to both scientific knowledge and political imaginaries of the environment. Rather than treating the Anthropocene as a contemporary phenomenon alone, this project situates it within a longer genealogy of visual representations of ecological crisis, resource extraction, and human-nonhuman relations. Through the analysis of art, illustration, photography, and visual media, Remapping the Anthropocene investigates how visual regimes have mediated ideas of climate, land, air, water, minerals, and nonhuman life over time. The project is designed to support students and ECR through an international hybrid workshop to be held in Melbourne, organised by Early Career Researchers and Art Historians Miguel Gaete (Melbourne), Elisabeth Ansel and Christin Neubauer (Jena). Outputs will also include a book proposal and an open international call for chapter contributions from scholars working across the sciences, humanities, and cultural studies.

Remapping the Anthropocene is an interdisciplinary project that brings together scholars and early-career researchers from the humanities, philosophy of science, and the natural sciences. Building on a past collaboration between the Modell Romantik Research Training Group (University of Jena) and the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Contemporary Culture Research Unit (University of Melbourne), the project investigates how human–nature relations have been imagined, visualised, and contested in visual culture from the Romantic period to the present.

This project approaches climate change not only as a scientific crisis but also as a cultural condition, examining how images generate ecological knowledge, shapes environmental perception, and legitimises particular forms of power. This is particularly urgent in colonial and postcolonial contexts, where representations of land, air, water, and life have historically served extractivist ideologies—and continue to inform environmental discourse today.

While the scientific dimensions of climate change are well established, its cultural and political implications remain under examined. By recovering earlier conceptualisations of the Anthropocene – such as the Anthropozoic – the project traces how visual culture has historically rendered ecological processes visible and politically charged. It bridges scientific and humanistic perspectives, engaging art history, environmental humanities, decolonial theory, environmental physics, and philosophy of science. Central to its approach is the question of how slow or imperceptible processes—climate change, biodiversity loss, resource extraction—are made perceptible through visual media.

Through ecocritical and decolonial frameworks, alongside case studies from Europe, the Americas, and Australia, Remapping the Anthropocene contributes to the environmental humanities, media studies, environmental sciences, and art history. It responds to the pressing need to rethink human–earth relations in a time of planetary crisis.

The project begins from the premise that nineteenth-century visual culture – especially Romantic painting, landscape art, and scientific and touristic illustration – helped form modern ecological consciousness. These images often presented nature as sublime and overwhelming, positioning humans as marginal or absent. Yet they also worked within imperial systems, using landscape to claim, survey, and control territory. Though not formally recognised as an epoch, the Anthropocene remains a potent heuristic and cultural-political term. Drawing on ecocriticism and postcolonial theory, the project explores how the visual regimes established in the nineteenth century persist in contemporary environmental representation. It addresses art history’s relatively limited engagement with climate change by offering a historically informed and globally situated account of environmental visual culture. Case studies span romantic aesthetics, contemporary eco-art, and activist imagery.

A key innovation lies in integrating art-historical research with environmental science. The team is comprised of art historians (Miguel Gaete, Elisabeth Ansel, Christin Neubauer), media studies (Cristóbal Escobar, University of Melbourne), and is advised by experts in environmental physics (Prof. Christian von Savigny, Universität Greifswald; Axel Kleidon, Max Planck, Institute for Biogeochemistry) and philosophy of science (Christian Larroulet, University of Melbourne), all of whom have already committed to participation.

Dr Miguel Gaete C. is a social art historian and a lecturer in Art History and Curatorship at the University of Melbourne. He holds a PhD in Aesthetics from the Autonomous University of Madrid and a second PhD in History of Art from the University of York. Dr Gaete's research focuses on European Romanticism and Modern Art, with particular attention to the intersections of science, race, and colonialism in the visual representation of Latin America from the 19th century to the present.

Dr Elisabeth Ansel is a postdoctoral research associate at the research group “European Romanticism or Romanticisms in Europe” at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. In 2021, she completed her PhD thesis on the constructions of national identity in Irish modernism exemplified by the artist Jack B. Yeats. This thesis was awarded the Dissertation Prize of the Commerzbank foundation and was published by Böhlau in 2023. In 2023, she has been awarded a Junior Fellowship at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg in Greifswald. In the winter term 2024/25, she held an interim professorship of the History of Art at the TU Dresden. In 2025, she was a visiting scholar at the Department of the History of Art, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA, funded by funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Christin Neubauer is a research assistant and doctoral candidate in the research group European Romanticism and the research training group The Romantic Model at the University of Jena, Germany. Her dissertation examines Pre-Raphaelitism through the lens of Romanticism, tracing its aesthetic and ideological continuities within a broader European framework.

The project began with regular virtual meetings between Ansel, Bates, and Gaete, during which the team finalised the research framework and refined the schedule for the forthcoming research stay in Melbourne. Concurrently, members pursued individual research strands, locating relevant material across museum collections, libraries, and digital archives to strengthen their respective areas of inquiry. With this groundwork underway, the team confirmed the Australian research stay for 11 November to 6 December 2026, structured around archival visits, gallery-based research, a museum talk, an interdisciplinary workshop, and participation in the AAANZ conference, for which we have applied to convene a project-centred panel. Talks are also underway with relevant parties regarding publication of the research findings. Travel and accommodation arrangements have been progressed, with flights booked for Ansel and Bates and accommodation secured for the duration of the stay; associated costs will be met through the second instalment of the project's funding.

This research examines how Western models of global art history proposed by the Vienna School were applied by Viennese-born Australian art historian Dr Gertrude Langer (1908–84). Through Langer’s teaching and writing in post-war Brisbane, it reveals complex dynamics between theoretical frameworks developed in Europe and their application within an Asia-Pacific context. Having studied with Josef Strzygowski – an influential yet controversial precursor to global art history – Langer introduced cross-cultural approaches to Australian art discourse. Addressing gaps in the historiography of the Vienna School, the project highlights the often-overlooked contributions of its female scholars and their diasporic influence.

Langer was a transformative figure in Australia’s post-war art and cultural scene. After fleeing Vienna following the Anschluss, she resettled in subtropical Brisbane, where she applied Vienna School theoretical underpinnings through art history and appreciation courses. Initially conducted around her dining table, her salon-style lectures evolved into a substantial educational endeavour attracting students, such as Betty Churcher and Joy Roggenkamp, and effectively established a mini–Viennese Art History school in Brisbane. Despite Langer’s immense influence, she remains largely overlooked.

This project asks: How did Langer’s pedagogical practices, informed by Strzygowski and the Vienna School, influence Australian art history within the Asia-Pacific context? Drawing on over 74 large boxes of archival material at the Fryer Library, including previously unexamined diaries, lecture materials, and photographic collections, the study traces Langer’s intellectual contributions, methodological evolution, and pedagogical innovations. It also compares Langer’s experiences with her peers, specifically Viennese Australian art historian Franz Philipp, to uncover institutional barriers and biases faced by women art historians and to better contextualize her impact on Australian art history.

This project reshapes art historical scholarship by uncovering overlooked perspectives within the Asia-Pacific context. Tracing global art history methods to the Vienna School and Strzygowski, it highlights the origins and complexities of cross-cultural comparison and hybrid pedagogies transplanted and transformed in Australia. In doing so, it challenges ideological biases and institutional barriers, foregrounding the intellectual labour of women art historians and refugee scholars. Addressing critical gaps in how Western theories were locally adapted, it advances a more inclusive historiography linking methodological innovation to migration, pedagogy, and institutional critique, ensuring insights resonate beyond the academy.

This project reshapes art historical scholarship by uncovering overlooked perspectives within the Asia-Pacific context. Tracing global art history methods to the Vienna School and Strzygowski, it highlights the origins and complexities of cross-cultural comparison and hybrid pedagogies transplanted and transformed in Australia. In doing so, it challenges ideological biases and institutional barriers, foregrounding the intellectual labour of women art historians and refugee scholars. Addressing critical gaps in how Western theories were locally adapted, it advances a more inclusive historiography linking methodological innovation to migration, pedagogy, and institutional critique, ensuring insights resonate beyond the academy.

Dr Louise Rollman and Dr Isabel Rousset's collaboration leverages their complementary expertise to deliver a nuanced understanding of Langer’s pedagogical influence. As the archival materials concerning Langer’s life in Vienna and her early teaching remain unexamined, her educational foundations and association with the Vienna School warrant closer analysis. Together, they extend current scholarship, foregrounding Langer’s role in the transnational circulation of art-historical knowledge shaped by refugee scholars.

Rollman, 2023 Fryer Library Fellow and lead investigator of Dr Gertrude Langer: The Art Historian as Dynamic Change Agent, has analysed approximately 30 percent of Langer's Papers, yielding new insights into Langer’s impact on both local and international art scenes.

Rousset, an architectural historian researching the impact of Central European migrant architects in Australia, previously encountered the Langer Papers while studying the oeuvre of Gertrude’s husband, architect Karl Langer. Rousset brings valuable experience in German archives and palaeography.