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DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force

Photo: Creative Commons/YaYapas

Prof. Dr. Maurice Saß

Curriculum

Maurice Saß is Professor of Art History at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences in Alfter, Germany. He studied international Business, German studies, philosophy, and art history in Nuremberg, Würzburg, Caen, and Munich. Following his PhD at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, he served as academic coordinator of the research group „Naturbilder / Images of Nature“ at the University of Hamburg (funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation). He is the spokesperson for the DFG research network „Cultural History of the Hunt“ and a co-organizer of the „Ecologies of Premodern Art“ working group within the Ulmer Verein. His research focuses on ecocritical art history, the visual history of knowledge, and the history of gender from the late Middle Ages to the modern period. He is the author of the monographs Physiologies of Images: Natural Magic and the Early Modern Understanding of Art (written in German, De Gruyter, 2016) and Artists’ Hunting Grounds: An Alternative History of Mimesis (written in German, Böhlau, 2024), as well as the editor of several collected volumes on materiality, multispecies relations, gender studies, and wildlife photography. Currently, he is preparing, together with Laura Beck, a handbook on the post-classical cultural history of European hunting, an edited volume on non-European perspectives on hunting with Thomas Widlock, and a special issue of the Regards croisés on images of violence against nature with Franca Buss and Violaine Gourbet. For further information, please visit: www.alanus.edu/menschen/prof-dr-maurice-sass.

Publications (selection)

  • Hunting Troubles. Gender and its intersections in the cultural history of the hunt. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2024 (together with Laura Beck). DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-70223-5.
  • Wild-Tier-Fotografie. Ökologische, postkoloniale und ästhetische Perspektiven. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler 2024 (together with Martin Bartelmus). DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-67150-4.
  • Toward an ecocritical history of early modern art. Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 88.4, 2025, 457-483 (together with Elizabeth J. Petcu). DOI: 10.1515/zkg-2025-4002 (ausgezeichnet mit dem 2nd RSA Renaissance Studies Article Prize, 2026).
  • The predatory core. Peter Paul Rubens and the hunt. The Art Bulletin 106.4, 2024, 6-32. DOI: 10.1080/00043079.2024.2357444.
  • Without nature. Rubens‘s watery landscapes. Netherlands Yearbook of Art History 73, 2023, 87-117. DOI: 10.1163/22145966-07301005.

Research project: Forests, Fields, and Peatlands: Energy Landscapes in the Early Modern Period

This research project proposes an ecocritical reinterpretation of forests, fields, and peatlands as energy landscapes. Drawing from contemporary debates on the environmental consequences of ongoing energy transitions, the term 'energy landscape' offers a heuristic framework for understanding how the making, perception, and evaluation of landscapes in the early modern period were fundamentally shaped by labor, force, and energy. Forests supplied fuel, fields sustained the energy needs of humans and other animals, and peatlands became some of Europe's earliest fossil energy landscapes through peat extraction. By focusing on these three cultivated landscapes—which have received comparatively little attention in current discussions of energy landscapes—the project seeks to foreground the historical specificity of early modern environmental thought and practice. Its aim is therefore not only to identify early forms of ecologically destructive practices and imaginaries, but, more importantly, to illuminate the plurality of visual strategies through which landscapes were conceived beyond entrenched nature–culture dualisms. Early modern art experimented with alternative ecological imaginaries and represented the circulation of forces as a more-than-human interplay, offering historically distinct ways of envisioning terrestrial relations between human and non-human beings.