Event – Detail Past

Once symbols of the past, ruins have become ubiquitous signs of our future. Americans today encounter ruins in the media on a daily basis--images of abandoned factories and malls, toxic landscapes, devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods. In this sweeping study, Miles Orvell offers a new understanding of the spectacle of ruins in US culture, exploring how photographers, writers, painters, and filmmakers have responded to ruin and destruction, both real and imaginary, in an effort to make sense of the past and envision the future.

Empire of Ruins explains why Americans in the nineteenth century yearned for the ruins of Rome and Egypt and how they portrayed a past as ancient and mysterious in the remains of Native American cultures. As the romance of ruins gave way to twentieth-century capitalism, older structures were demolished to make way for grander ones, a process interpreted by artists as a symptom of America's "creative destruction." In the late twentieth century, Americans began to inhabit a perpetual state of ruins, made visible by photographs of decaying inner cities, derelict factories and malls, and the waste lands of the mining industry. This interdisciplinary work focuses on how visual media have transformed disaster and decay into spectacles that compel our moral attention even as they balance horror and beauty. Looking to the future, Orvell considers the visual portrayal of climate ruins as we face the political and ethical responsibilities of our changing world.

A wide-ranging work by an acclaimed urban, cultural, and photography scholar, Empire of Ruins offers a provocative and lavishly illustrated look at the American past, present, and future.

Reception and book signing to follow.

Miles Orvell was the winner of the 2021 Athenaeum Literary Award for Art & Architecture

Miles Orvell is Professor of English & American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. His publications have ranged from literary criticism to broader studies of American culture. His early book on Flannery O'Connor was followed by The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (1989),  a study of technology and culture that was co-winner of the ASA's John Hope Franklin Prize (reissued in a Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition). The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community (2012) was a Finalist for the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize for Best Book Published on Community and Social Cohesion,  2013. Orvell's Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, and the Spectacle of Destruction was published by Oxford University Press in early 2021.

In addition, he is the author of After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries (1995) and of American Photography (2003) in the Oxford History of Art Series. (Expanded and revised in 2016 as Photography in America.) Orvell has edited the volume, John Vachon's America: Photographs and Letters from the Depression to World War II (2003) and he has co-edited Public Place and the Ideology of Space in America (2009) and Rethinking the American City: An International Dialogue (2013). He was the founding editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of American Studies (American Studies Association--print and online),  from 1998 to 2011. He is the recipient of several NEH awards and of the Bode-Pearson Prize in American Studies for lifetime achievement. In 2010, he received one of the University’s “Great Teacher” awards.