Join us on Wednesday 19th March at 3:15pm in the G.07 Meadows Lecture Theatre located in the Medical School, Teviot for a lecture by Dr Noreen Masud. This event will also be available online via Zoom. A drinks reception will be held in the The Pod at Edinburgh Climate Change Institute from 5:00pm.

Painting Flat Landscapes: Repetition and Imagination from Koninck to O’Keeffe by Dr Noreen Masud

Though flat landscapes such as fens, marshes, plains and prairies may be richly biodiverse, or else excellent locations for building towns and growing crops, aesthetically they barely seem to register in the West’s cultural sense of beauty. Instead, in the popular imagination, flat landscapes tend to provoke, variously, boredom, fear and hostility. Since the Romantic poets valorised mountains in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, flat landscapes have seemed barely worth looking at – barely, in fact, landscapes at all. And yet, for centuries, renowned writers and artists have looked at them, and written about them, and painted them. These works – challenging, overtly or otherwise, cultural assumptions about what constitutes ‘value’ or ‘beauty’ – encode a whole new set of terms for their own reception, which fall outwith aesthetic, literary and art-historical discursive norms. Ranging from Philips Koninck to Georgia O’Keeffe, this lecture asks: how, and why, might one paint a flat landscape? What would a ‘perfect’ flat landscape look like? And how might flatness challenge our 'sense of an ending'?

Dr Noreen Masud is a Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her research covers all kinds of bases: flatness, spivs, puppets, leftovers, earworms, footnotes, rhymes, hymns, surprises, folk songs, colours, superstitions.

The Wreford Watson Lecture Series commemorates the life and work of James Wreford Watson (1915-1990) a geographer and poet who formerly held the chair in the Geography Department at Edinburgh. The Lecture is given every other year by a prominent intellectual from out-with or inside the academic discipline of Geography, that is offered the opportunity to speak to a geographical topic of their choice. It is funded by the Edinburgh University Club of Toronto.

Wreford Watson Lecture 2025