Amy Woodson-Boulton

University of California at Los Angeles

Ph.D.

History

2003

University of California at Los Angeles

M.A.

History

1999

University of California at Berkeley

B.A

History

1994

Elected Companion of the Guild of St. George

2016-04-08

Driven by his deep faith in social justice, John Ruskin established the Guild of St George in the 1870s to right some of the social wrongs of the day and make England a happier and more beautiful place in which to live and work. More active than ever before, we continue to promote the value of art, craftsmanship and a sustainable rural economy, putting Ruskin's ideas into practice in the 21st century.

http://www.guildofstgeorge.org.uk/

Ruskin and the Plastic Crisis, Or “Modern Manufacture and Design,” 2022

Plastic is now evidence in the rock strata for the Anthropocene as a geological epoch and embodies multiple aspects of our current crises: our disposable economy, reliance on fossil fuels, rapidly changing climate, and the unevenly distributed toxic effects at all stages of plastic’s production, use, and disposal. Now that microplastics are everywhere from the air to the ocean to human blood, Ruskin’s sense of both “modern manufacture” and the “storm-cloud” of uncontrolled production and pollution has taken on new meaning. Thinking about Ruskin and plastic together can give us ideas and materials for thinking through the intertwined problems of systemic racism, mass production, hidden costs, art and design, and extractive economies.
https://youtu.be/hLsx9H6GqZ4

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant

Huntington Library, Museum, and Art Gallery

2025-04-01

Book project: The Nature of Primitive Art: How Victorian Anthropology Made Britain Modern

Chapter 4, “Salvaged Ruins and Vanishing Futures: Ancient Monuments, ‘Primitive’ Art, and Historic Preservation.”

As they expanded their global empire, the British developed exhibitions, anthropological discourse, preservation movements, and extensive museum holdings, but scholars rarely consider these together. Britons worked both to “salvage” what was left of the “disappearing” peoples in the colonies and to preserve or protect traditional culture and ancient monuments at home from the same self-created juggernaut of change. At a time when “prehistory” became a common term and way to conceptualize deep time, British lawmakers and cultural leaders worked to protect prehistoric ruins and ancient monuments from restoration, urbanization, and expanding railways. This effort took multiple forms, such as the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, founded in 1877 to stop architectural “restoration,” or the 1882 Ancient Monuments Act, to catalogue and preserve ancient sites such as standing stones. Overlapping networks of anthropologists and preservationists tried to save what would not otherwise survive their modern, technological society, defined by extraction, mass production, and mass consumption. Outsiders and social critics often did this in much deeper despair, hoping for better times even as they recognized the loss of much that they held dear (e.g., John Ruskin, William Morris, and the movements they led and inspired). Who decided what survived and what did not? How much did their work influence each other? How much were they in conversation? The Huntington collections will let me address such questions about the past that continue to resonate today, in the institutions and historic sites still shaped by these nineteenth-century movements. Monumental exhibitions, museal landscapes of ancient ruins and medieval buildings, and collections of “salvaged” artifacts all contributed to a shared vision of the future as industrial, capitalist, and led by “Westerners,” who would use technology to control the natural world. This vision still haunts us.

Art and Power

First Year Seminar

Modern Global Environmental History

This lower-division history course covers modern global history, c. 1500 to the present, with a particular focus on environmental history, exploring how humans, animals, natural forces, and science and technology have shaped the environment; the ways in which historical developments such as migration, empire, trade, industrialization, and urbanization have affected humans’ relationships with nature; and how the environment has affected historical developments. Students will consider a wide variety of economic, political, and cultural conceptions of – and relationships with – environments, animals, and “nature.”

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Power and Privilege in Modern European History

Lower-division history survey

"Capturing the World: Exhibition Trophies, Ethnography, and Displays of Imperial Power"

Amy Woodson-Boulton

2025-08-04

Exhibition trophies have become invisible to most people reading about and looking at images of the great world’s fairs. This is not surprising; trophies have fallen out of our awareness because they, and the criticisms they provoked, have received surprisingly little scholarly attention. This article reveals not only this largely overlooked form, but also just how much cultural work they were doing and why so many people found them disturbing. Exhibition trophies became a solution to the nineteenth-century design problem of representing progress, imperial power, extractive superabundance, control of the natural world, and industrial capacity. Nineteenth-century exhibitors and collectors made trophies out of a wide array of commodities, animals, raw materials, manufactured goods, weapons, and “primitive” objects. But by carrying with them ancient connotations of high-minded victory and violence, exhibition trophies also inspired criticisms that got to the heart of modern forms of conquest. Divisive in the middle of the nineteenth century, trophies were ubiquitous by the turn of the twentieth. Meanwhile a new, rival way of displaying imperial power emerged that challenged ethnographic trophies in particular: the new science of anthropology. This article begins to recover this lost form and its implications—from disquiet to the acceptance of abundance (even overabundance) as a collective goal.

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"Ruskin, Slavery, and Zombie History"

Amy Woodson-Boulton

2025-04-23

“Ruskin, Slavery, and Zombie History” examines John Ruskin’s frequent comparison of industrial work to “slavery” and argues that his use of this analogy contributed to still-prevalent narratives that separate the history of the transatlantic slave trade from the history of industrialization. Ruskin’s trenchant social critiques help us think about machines as forces that take over our will and treat all nature as a resource to be exploited. However, I argue that by framing industry as “enslaving” English workers while dismissing the suffering of the literally- and legally-enslaved, he actively disconnected what were in fact mutually dependent systems of racial capitalism; he railed against commodification and objectification while shifting its victims from the plantation to the factory. Meanwhile, enslaved practitioners of vodou or obeah addressed similar problems of agency, objectification, and social death. This essay explores how Ruskin engaged with race, slavery, and the “slave analogy” and considers his work in relation to the figure of the zonbi in order to reconnect the horrors of racialized slavery to Ruskin’s critiques of industrial capitalism. Putting Ruskin’s works in this broader context contests nationalist historical narratives around the origins of industrialization that avoid its connection with the difficult history of slavery.

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“Teaching Modern World History, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Urgency of Climate Change”

Elizabeth Drummond and Amy Woodson-Boulton

2021-06-01

https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/18.2/pdfs/04_WHC_18_2_Drummond.pdf

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