Hélène Ibata
Biography
Hélène Ibata is professor in British art, history and visual culture at the Department of English of the University of Strasbourg. Her main areas of research include late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century visual culture in Britain, Enlightenment aesthetic theory and, more recently, ecocritical art history.
She is an alumna of the École normale supérieure (ENS) de Fontenay (1989-1994). She holds an agrégation in English and a PhD from the Sorbonne Nouvelle (completed in 1998). After working as a French lectrice at the University of Cambridge from 1990 to 1992, and as a teaching assistant at the University Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, she was appointed senior lecturer at the University of Nancy 2 in 1999, and then at the University of Strasbourg in 2002. She was appointed professor in 2017, and is currently director of the SEARCH research group (Knowledge in the Anglophone Area: Representations, Culture, History).
She has written extensively on the art of William Blake, J.M.W. Turner, early panoramas, as well as the theory of the sublime; a range of interests that is encompassed in her monograph The Challenge of the Sublime: From Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic Art (Manchester UP, 2018). Her work has also been published in the journals Word & Image, European Romantic Review, The British Art Journal and Romanticism on the Net, among others. More recently, she has explored topics related to the visual culture of voyages of exploration and supervised doctoral projects in connection with this new focus. An increasing engagement with ecocritical perspectives led her to organize two conferences, each complemented by an exhibition, “Contemporary Ruins” (2021) and “Uncertain Landscapes” (2022), funded by the MISHA (Alsace Inter-University House for the Social Sciences and Humanities) and resulting in guest issues of Interfaces – Image, Text(e), Lang(u)age (2023) and Intermédialités (2025).
Fellowship 2025
Dates - 01/09/2025-31/08/2027
Project summary
ECOCRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON BRITISH ROMANTIC VISUAL CULTURE AND THE FIRST INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
The present research project aims to contribute to the recent ecocritical turn in art history by offering a comprehensive study of visual artists’ responses to and engagement with anthropogenic change in Britain at the time of the First Industrial Revolution.
Specifically, it investigates the emergence of a nascent ecological consciousness in British visual culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as manifested by new forms of attentiveness to the natural world, alongside growing attention to the effects of industrialization. Four avenues of research have been identified: the development of immersive and sensorial forms of engagement with natural environments in Romantic landscape painting; the incorporation of scientific understandings of organic processes and geological time scales in artists’ depictions of natural sites and phenomena; explicit depictions of environmental degradation at industrial and extractive sites; and the lasting impact of these historical artistic strategies on contemporary environmental art practices.
The study notably addresses artworks that have been traditionally overlooked in mainstream art historical scholarship—topographical illustrations, sketches by artist travellers, paintings and prints from industrial regions, and innovative media such as panoramas—highlighting the significance of a broad range of visual practices in shaping ecological consciousness. Drawing on recent theoretical developments in ecocritical art history and interdisciplinary insights from cultural geography, the history of science, environmental aesthetics, phenomenological aesthetics and new materialist theories, this research also challenges anthropocentric and ocular-centric interpretations, emphasizing instead a complex, embodied, and environmentally attentive visuality.
As art history increasingly demonstrates its relevance to debates within the environmental humanities, this project aims to emphasize the importance of reexamining the visual culture of a historical context often identified as the onset of the Anthropocene. Through an interdisciplinary dialogue, it seeks to offer new perspectives on the intersection of visual culture and ecological awareness, contributing to both art historical scholarship and contemporary environmental discourse.
