Wasteland

“Vittoria Di Palma has taken on the unconventional challenge of defining a subject that is ‘a foil to the notion of an ideal landscape,’ and provides a valuable, original, and rigorous assessment of major themes in landscape studies, with sound historical and intellectual reasoning.”—Therese O’Malley, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art

~Therese O'Malley

“This is a wonderful book, a history of the senses, and sensibilities, that people have brought to landscape. Vittoria di Palma writes with a terrific combination of critical intelligence and palpable delight in her material.”— Jedediah Purdy, Duke University School of Law

~Jedediah Purdy

Winner of the 2015 J.B. Jackson Prize sponsored by the Foundation for Landscape Studies.

~J.B. Jackson, Foundation for Landscape Studies

Won an Honorable Mention for the 2015 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) in the Architecture and Urban Planning category.

~PROSE, American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence

Winner of the 2014-15 Louis Gottschalk Prize, given by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

~Louis Gottschalk Prize, American society for eighteenth-century Studies

“Di Palma's work, which conjoins the resources of art history, landscape and garden studies, the history of science, and more disciplines still, is a scholarly tour-de-force that synthesizes disparate studies of subjects ranging from land enclosure to the sublime in order to shed new light on the prehistory of our current ecological challenges…. Beautifully illustrated and evocatively written, Wasteland: A History is an original, informative, and elegant piece of scholarship that develops strong and surprising connections between aesthetic values and moral debates about land use. Ranging freely between numerous disciplines, Vittoria Di Palma shows how the concept of the wasteland has long and diversely shaped what has now become, for better and for worse, our industrial modernity.”—American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

~American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Winner of the 2016 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians.

~Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award, Society of Architectural Historians

"Every now and then, a gifted scholar produces a book that simultaneously reimagines some broad dimension of everyday life in the early modern British world and situates the telling of that experience in the physicality of material culture....All scholars of the early modern British world should read this book."
—Louis P. Nelson

~Louis P. Nelson, Buildings and Landscapes

"Wasteland: A History is a major achievement: meticulously researched, theoretically nuanced, and written in lucid, sensitive prose."
—Izabel Gass

~Izabel Gass, Eighteenth-Century Studies

Winner of the 2016 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize given by the American Historical Association.

~Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, American Historical Association

"This brilliantly conceived and elegantly written book draws on an array of disciplines to examine the neglected concept of wasteland since the early modern period. Understanding wasteland as a counterpart to wilderness and developed space, Di Palma sensitively depicts the tension between aesthetic responses to the landscape and the rationalizing pressures of advancing central state power and new survey techniques, set in the context of agricultural improvement and changing market relations." –American Historical Association

~American Historical Association