Stephanie O'Rourke is a historian of European art particularly in relation to resource extraction, scientific knowledge, and media technologies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She also collaborates with artists and climate scientists to explore landscapes of extraction in the present day. 

Her book Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction (University of Chicago Press; awarded the Rosemary Mitchell Book Prize, BAVS 2026) examines how artistic production responded to and helped to shape the rise of extractive capitalism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Multi-national in its scope, this book explores how European landscapes pictured the natural environment in relation to specific extractive industries such as mining and timber harvesting as well as emerging concepts about race, climate, and waste operative within the continent and its colonial networks.

Dr O'Rourke's first book (Art, Science and the Body in Early Romanticism, Cambridge University Press; awarded the BARS First Book Prize) focuses on the relationship between art and the production of scientific knowledge at the dawn of the nineteenth century. It reveals some of the ways that artworks were critical actors in a larger epistemological transformation taking place at the twilight of European Enlightenment. 

Recent publications explore: art and infrastructure in nineteenth-century Britain (nonsite); resource extraction and German romanticism (Apollo Magazine); deep time and Caspar David Friedrich (Representations); electricity and art during the French Revolution (Art History); and the role of race and gender in Enlightenment knowledge-production (Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal18).

Dr O'Rourke has been a professeur invité at the Sorbonne in Paris (2024) and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (2026). Her work has been supported by a Paul Mellon Centre Mid-Career Fellowship (2026), a Saltire Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2022), and a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2020). She has received additional grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Yale Center for British Art, the Royal Academy, the Association for Art History, the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, and elsewhere. From 2013-14 she was a Mellon-funded research fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, where she worked primarily on the exhibition 'Degas: A Strange New Beauty' (2016).

2015-2016       Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Fellowship, Columbia University

2014-2015       Ary Stillman Fellowship, Columbia University

2013-2014       Museum Research Consortium Fellowship, The Museum of Modern Art

2012-2013       International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Social Science Research Council

2012                Visiting Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art

2011                Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, Social Science Research Council

2011                Cathedral Fund Fellowship, Royal Academy of Arts, London

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European visual culture

BA Harvard University (2008), PhD Columbia University (2016)