Xiaoyao Guo

Princeton University, USA

Short vita

Year of study : 2021

Scientific positions or activities: Doctoral Candidate

Duration of the scholarship Multiple Aufklärungen: 01.05.2026–01.07.2026

Research project

Contested Assemblage: Remapping the Genealogy of Modern Landscape

My dissertation argues for a processual and conflictual genealogy of landscape for our current age of ecological exigency, over and against the established conceptualization of landscape as harmonious unity. Examining through literature, visual arts, and intellectual history the concept of landscape as the site of "tensional entanglement" between human and nature, this dissertation investigates different landscape topoi at their specific cultural historical moments as assemblage in which incongruent entities and scales encounter and reveal each other, be they physical sensibilities, psychic apparatuses, or medial techniques. Consequently, landscape only “becomes” such through its inherent tensions and ever-present mediation between nature and culture, human and nonhuman. In this light, it historicizes the very (im)possibility of translation between human and nature as a way of defamiliarizing contemporary imaginations of a naïve interconnectivity, and articulates for our contemporary moment a more relevant “ecological” consciousness predicated on ambivalence and precarity.