This lecture will identify the origins, trajectories and tangles of the many revolutionary landscapes that have criss-crossed the Atlantic since the late eighteenth century.  Moving from west to east, and from Philadelphia and Virginia to Dublin and Geneva, such reversed vistas will also question the implicit trajectory of much historical narrative. It will also explore how landscape tours became a precondition for revolutionary thought.

Finola O’Kane Crimmins lectures in the School of Architecture UCD where she directs the MUBC programme. An architect, landscape historian and conservation specialist, her first book Landscape Design in Eighteenth-century Ireland: Mixing Foreign Trees with the Natives was published in 2004 and awarded the inaugural J.B. Jackson Book Prize by the American Landscape Foundation in 2007. Her most recent book  Ireland and the Picturesque: Design, Landscape Painting and Tourism in Ireland 1700–1840 was published in 2013 by Yale University Press on behalf of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. In 2013 she was appointed a fellow of Dumbarton Oaks by the Trustees of Harvard University, embarking on a research project entitled ‘Revolutionary Landscapes: Ireland, France and America 1700–1810’.