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/

Elected Companion of the Guild of St. George

North American Victorian Studies Association

Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies

North American Conference on British Studies

Advisory Board, Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States

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

“Totems, Cannibals, and Other Blood Relations: Animals and the Rise of Social Evolutionary Theory”

"‘The natives have a decided feeling for form’: Oceania, ‘Primitive Art,’ and the Illusion of Simplicity"

"You Are What You Reform? Class, Consumption, and Identity in Victorian Britain"

"John Ruskin and the Art Museum Movement"

“A Window onto Nature: Visual Language, Aesthetic Ideology, and the Art of Social Transformation”

"Victorian Museums and Victorian Society"

"‘Industry without Art Is Brutality’: Aesthetic Ideology and Social Practice in Victorian Art Museums"

"The Art of Compromise: The National Gallery of British Art, 1890-1892"

Why did British industrial cities build art museums? By exploring the histories of the municipal art museums in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, Transformative Beauty examines the underlying logic of the Victorian art museum movement. These museums attempted to create a space free from the moral and physical ugliness of industrial capitalism. 

Transformative Beauty: Art Museums in Industrial Britain

Providing a comprehensive interdisciplinary assessment, and with a particular focus on expressions of tension and anxiety about modernity, this collection examines visual culture in nineteenth-century Europe as it attempted to redefine itself in the face of social change and new technologies. 

Visions of the Industrial Age

Loyola Marymount University is a top-ranked national university by U.S. News and World Report, which places LMU among the top six Jesuit universities in the country and in the top six private universities in California. Founded in 1911, LMU is a Catholic, Jesuit, and Marymount university with more than 7,100 undergraduate students and more than 3,000 graduate and law students. LMU offers 56 undergraduate majors and 56 minor programs, along with 46 master’s degree programs, three doctorate programs and 12 credential/authorization programs. LMU’s intercollegiate athletics teams compete in the West Coast Conference with 14 Division I varsity sports.

LMU news and events are found at: www.lmu.edu/news.

Loyola Marymount University

Art and Power

Modern Global Environmental History

Power and Privilege in Modern European History

History and Historians/What is History?

Utopia, Or a History of the Future, 1500 to the Present

Modern Ireland, 1800 to the Present

Crime Stories: Morality, Deviance, and Popular Culture in Modern Britain

Museums and Society in European History

Topics in Public History: Britain, Ireland, and the Empire

Topics in Public History: Exhibiting Sainthood

Upper-division seminar: The Artist and the Machine

Amy Woodson-Boulton is professor of British and Irish history and past chair of the Department of History at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. She holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley and an M.A. and Ph.D from UCLA. Her work concentrates on cultural reactions to industrialization in Britain, particularly the history of museums, the social role of art, and the changing status and meaning of art and nature in modern society. Published work includes articles and book chapters as well as her monograph Transformative Beauty: Art Museums in Industrial Britain (Stanford, 2012) and a volume that she coedited with Minsoo Kang, Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830–1914: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation (Routledge, 2008). She is currently working on a book-length study of ideas about “primitive art” in anthropology and art criticism, tentatively titled Explaining Art: Nature, Authentic Culture, and the Search for Origins in the Age of Empire. She teaches courses on British, Irish, modern European, imperial, and global history, with a focus on museum studies and cultural, public, and environmental history. She has presented to numerous scholarly and community groups, including work on the history of art and anthropology museums, the legacy of John Ruskin, and the environmental crises of plastics and climate change.

Environmental History

British History

Anthropology

Imperialism

Museum Studies

Art History

European History

History

Loyola Marymount University History Department

Totems, Cannibals, and Other Blood Relations: Animals and the Rise of Social Evolutionary Theory

The Storm Cloud of the Twenty-First Century

When is a Bear a Frog? Examining Material Culture Interpretation

Beyond Compare: Art from Africa in the Bode Museum

The City Art Museum Movement and the Social Role of Art

Visions of the Industrial Age: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation in European Culture, c. 1830-1914

Course exhibition: Beneath the Banner of the Cross: The Global Vision of the Early Jesuits

Course online exhibition: Postcards from History

Course online exhibition: Thomas Horsfall in Context

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

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

Professor of History

Select Inquiry Type