About
Weiyi Wu is Associate Professor in the School of Arts of Nanjing University, where she has been working since 2016. She received her PhD from University College Cork in 2013. Before joining Nanjing University, she did her postdoctoral research at Shanghai Jiao Tong University from 2014 to 2016. She is a member of the Global Humanities Initiative, a research network anchored at Cambridge University and brings together Fudan and Nanjing Universities in China, Ashoka University in India, the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, and Sabanci University in Turkey.
Weiyi Wu’s research focuses on global art history, comparative art and world art studies, with emphasis on transformations of technologies and material cultures. She has published a few peer-reviewed articles in the field’s leading journals, along with book chapters by prestigious publishers. Visit Weiyi Wu’s full profile.
Research
At CRASSH, Weiyi Wu will start a new project on (Re)mediation of Nature in Hudson River landscape paintings, which is part of her long-term interest in landscape art. Focusing on Thomas Cole and his pupil Fredric Church, this project aims to examine variations of the ‘Hudson River Landscape’ by analysing the cross-fertilisation between the emerging American school of landscape painting and Romantic Poetry, artistic photography from the perspective of comparative arts. The paradoxical role of photography is carefully investigated in order to reveal how nature is constructed as an aesthetic ideal through mediation and remediation by geologists, travellers and artists. The relationship between art and technology is thus a central theme of this project, which takes its discussion to a more nuanced layer – the sense of darkness inherent in aesthetic Modernism, thus manifesting the relevance of this project to current theoretic debates on environmental aesthetics, posthumanism and Anthropocene.
Weiyi Wu plans to gather historical materials about Thomas Cole’s visit to England and Europe to find clues to his satirical paintings. She will attend seminars, lectures and other academic activities at CRASSH, trying to build a wide network with colleagues there.
