Veronica Della Dora
Biographic Data
| ID | 84262 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Veronica Della Dora |
| GIVEN NAMES | Veronica |
| FAMILY NAME | Della Dora |
| SIGNATURE | DELLA DORA V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bristol |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7665-8998 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 349 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The man who made planets
This article explores the emergence of a modern planetary imagination during the International Geophysical Year (1957–58) and the early space age through the work of American commercial artist Kenneth S. Fagg. It focuses on his celebrated Geo-Physical Globe, the first precision-built relief globe ever made by mass production methods. The Geo-Physical Globe embodies a transitional moment between the air age and the space age; it replaces the smoot…
Landscape as a way of seeing
British geographer Denis Cosgrove (1948–2008) pioneered a new approach to the study of landscape. His work on the relations between landscape, ideology, image and practice was central to the reshaping of cultural geography in the 1990s. Perhaps even more significantly, his approach was fundamental in critically repositioning Geography in the humanities. Following Cosgrove’s wanderings in mainland Veneto, this chapter explores some of the key aspe…
From the Radio Shack to the Cosmos
Whereas literature on satellites and outer space exploration has usually been dominated by vision, humankind’s initial encounter with the Earth’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, was overwhelmingly sonic. Tracking was originally enabled by the signal continuously transmitted by its radio beacon. Embedded in the International Geophysical Year (IGY) citizen science programs, radio amateurs played a crucial role in receiving the signal and ass…
Space, Place and Religious Landscapes
Over the past decade, the Humanities have seen an unprecedented surge of interest in high places. This can be partly ascribed to a wider concern with climate change: mountains are environmental bar
Listening to the archive
Sound is a fundamental dimension of human experience. However, its ephemeral nature poses specific challenges to historical geographers and other scholars concerned with the study of the past. The last two decades have nonetheless witnessed an increased interest in the spatialities of historical sounds and acoustic environments in geography and across the humanities by large. This article offers a brief overview of some of this work. In particula…
Landscape, Nature, and the Sacred in Byzantium
Infrasecular geographies
Debates on the postsecular have been paralleled by a growing body of work on sacred space. Most of this work has generally focused on its ‘making’ and on the ‘unofficially sacred’. Transformations of extant official sites of worship have largely remained out of such debates despite increasing public attention and a burgeoning literature in the humanities. In bringing these processes into geographers’ agendas, this article suggests a shift in focu…
Light and sight
Beyond the Screen
This article offers a reflection on the concept of landscape through the work of Luigi Ghirri (1943–1992), one of the pioneers of contemporary Italian photography in the 1970s and 1980s. In Ghirri’s photographs, landscape operates as a surface and as a threshold, as a medium of exchange and as a way of seeing. Along with his many commentaries and essays on the subject, Ghirri’s photographs of landscape scenes, landscape screens, and landscape obj…
The Geographical Unconscious
Gardens of Eden and ladders to heaven
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Mapping Greece, 1420–1800
Mapping Pathways to Heaven
The subject of this article is the first extant topographical engraving of Meteora, the second largest monastic complex in Greece and one of the most spectacular landscapes in the world. This late eighteenth-century print combined cartographic principles with techniques traditionally used in Byzantine painting, which situates it within a broader vernacular Greek cartographic tradition. It can also be considered a mental map of the region as envis…
Topia
Landscape is commonly deemed to be a western European Renaissance invention linked to the theorization of linear perspective as a distinctively “modern” way of looking at the world. Prompted by a resurging interest in premodern geographies, this article takes a step back and interrogates nonlinear perceptions and graphic representations of the environment in Roman antiquity (the so-called topia) and their development in the Byzantine world. Since…
Crossing Surfaces in Search of the Holy
This paper examines the role of surfaces in pilgrimage practices and experiences in two denominational and cultural contexts and landscape settings for Christian pilgrimage: a week of Ecumenical pilgrimage walks in the Isle of Man and Orthodox pilgrimage to the monasteries of Meteora in Greece. Surfaces are examined as dynamic textured platforms for journeying and stages for the performance of ritual; as part of visual aesthetic and multisensory …
On canonical geographies
Histories of geography are, by their very nature, selective enterprises. The apparent tendency of geographers to disparage particular periods of the discipline’s history, at the same time as exalting others, is characteristic of the way in which progress has been measured, relevance defined, and novelty identified. Yet, whilst other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences actively engage with their textual canons and founding figures, g…
We have never been canonical
In responding to the commentaries on Keighren et al. (2012), we discuss in this paper the nature of memory and forgetfulness in geography and examine what the implications of active forgetting are for the stories we tell about geography and geographers. We explore the role which fashion plays in directing the course of the discipline and what this means for our engagement with the work of past geographers. Finally, we consider how notions of inhe…
Setting and Blurring Boundaries
Geographies of Mars
GEOGRAPHIES OF MARS: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet. By K. MARIA D. LANE. xiii and 266 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780226470788. The word embeds a double act of inscription. Geo-graphein means or, more literally, writing, scratching the By interpreting the earth, geographers inscribe its surface with stories based on preexisting knowledge and experience. By describing it,…
Is geography the eye of (pre-modern) history? Looking back at and looking through medieval geographies
This commentary responds to Lilley's (2011) provocative suggestion to move away from periodizing geography and think instead in terms of spatial perceptions and representations across and within certain spatial and temporal contexts. In particular, it problematizes equations between medieval geographies and western or pre-modern geographies. It does so by situating western medieval geographies side by side other ‘pre-modern’ histories, and by con…
Anti-Landscapes
Caves occupy a special place in the Christian East. According to the Byzantine traditions, caves are the spaces where biblical paradoxical wonders took place, beyond human vision and understanding (from the birth of Christ from a virgin to his resurrection and the revelation to Saint John on Patmos). In the 4th century biblical caves were officially put on the map of empire by Constantine as sites physically marking the inexplicable dogmas of the…
Engaging Sacred Space
This article reflects on the experience of theorizing sacred space through field practice as part of a fieldtrip to Barcelona. In particular, it focuses on the critical analysis of different approaches to sacred space as applied to various sites in the city. The article opens with a brief review of three mainstream approaches to sacred space: the ‘structuralist’, the ‘postmodern’ and the ‘more-than-representational’. It then reflects on the limit…
Scriptural Geography
Making Mobile Knowledges
In particular, it considers a series of voyages d'etude organized by the French scientific periodical Revue Générale des Sciences Pures et Appliquées between 1897 and 1914 that were open to the general public. It examines both the ways and the spaces in which knowledge was produced and the type of knowledge that was produced
Performative Atlases
Maps have traditionally been conceptualized as visual representations and studied for what they represent. In the past few years, however, scholars from different disciplines have started to approach them from new perspectives. Broadly speaking, art historians have shown increased interest in their materialities, and geographers and map historians in their social and performative aspects. This article reviews and synthesizes these approaches usin…
Geography, religion, and emerging paradigms
This introduction to the subsequent forum addresses social and cultural geography's recent engagement with religion and spirituality. While representing a laudable and increasing willingness to approach religion/spirituality through sophisticated concepts and theories, this engagement should include more than just an imposition of the discipline's emerging paradigms on a new object of study. Geographers need to allow religion to 'speak back'. The…
Infrasecular geographies
Debates on the postsecular have been paralleled by a growing body of work on sacred space. Most of this work has generally focused on its ‘making’ and on the ‘unofficially sacred’. Transformations of extant official sites of worship have largely remained out of such debates despite increasing public attention and a burgeoning literature in the humanities. In bringing these processes into geographers’ agendas, this article suggests a shift in focu…
Dreams so Big Only the Sea Can Hold Them
This paper explores a new phenomenon which is assuming global proportions: the planning and construction of artificial islands. Varying in size, shape, and purpose, man-made islands are looming on the horizons of an increasing number of aspiring global cities and regions at the margins of global capitalism. From the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea, from the Caribbean to the North Sea, artificial islands are increasingly embraced as spectacular, tec…
Travelling landscape-objects
Over the past few years the notion of `landscape as a text' has been increasingly problematized. A number of experiments have been attempted to approach landscape via a revisited phenomenology. Landscape in the sense of graphic pictorial representation, however, has largely remained out of such debates. Reviewing and synthesizing work on landscape, materiality and performance, this article suggests some new directions for study. In particular, it…
The rhetoric of nostalgia
Memory, nostalgia and place are subjects of increasing scholarly interest. While invoked by cultural geographers as a 'productive force' moulding urban landscape, nostalgia often remains an unexamined, a priori concept. Through the exploration of different reactions to the spatialized history of postcolonial Alexandria, I consider nostalgia as a fluid, multifaceted, and performative force operating at different scales and levels: on one hand, an …
Crossing Surfaces in Search of the Holy
This paper examines the role of surfaces in pilgrimage practices and experiences in two denominational and cultural contexts and landscape settings for Christian pilgrimage: a week of Ecumenical pilgrimage walks in the Isle of Man and Orthodox pilgrimage to the monasteries of Meteora in Greece. Surfaces are examined as dynamic textured platforms for journeying and stages for the performance of ritual; as part of visual aesthetic and multisensory …
Engaging Sacred Space
This article reflects on the experience of theorizing sacred space through field practice as part of a fieldtrip to Barcelona. In particular, it focuses on the critical analysis of different approaches to sacred space as applied to various sites in the city. The article opens with a brief review of three mainstream approaches to sacred space: the ‘structuralist’, the ‘postmodern’ and the ‘more-than-representational’. It then reflects on the limit…
Setting and Blurring Boundaries
On canonical geographies
Histories of geography are, by their very nature, selective enterprises. The apparent tendency of geographers to disparage particular periods of the discipline’s history, at the same time as exalting others, is characteristic of the way in which progress has been measured, relevance defined, and novelty identified. Yet, whilst other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences actively engage with their textual canons and founding figures, g…
Mountains and memory
Over the past few years, the relationship between landscape and the body as two physical entities mutually informed through performance has been increasingly interrogated by cultural geographers. Similar issues about memory, embodiment and performativity have been raised in the social sciences, yet often obliterating the material specificities of place and landscape. This paper reconsiders the relationship between landscape and memory in terms of…
Putting the world into a box
Materiality, performance and mobility have recently attracted increasing interdisciplinary interest and called for new approaches to landscape. In most cases, however, these remain limited to the first meaning of landscape, as a complex of material/ visual forms in a given geographic area. By contrast, the second meaning of landscape, as a representation on different media, has remained out of such a debate. This article proposes a reconcep-tuali…
Mapping Global War
Writing on popular geographies has emphasized the shaping role of media. Newspapers and magazines, school texts, and atlases, had particular impacts on the twentieth century American geographical imagination, notably during World War II when news cartography became entwined with geopolitical mapping. The wartime mapmaker Richard Edes Harrison has been cited as exemplary of the role graphics played in promoting and popularizing an “air-age” geogra…
Anti-Landscapes
Caves occupy a special place in the Christian East. According to the Byzantine traditions, caves are the spaces where biblical paradoxical wonders took place, beyond human vision and understanding (from the birth of Christ from a virgin to his resurrection and the revelation to Saint John on Patmos). In the 4th century biblical caves were officially put on the map of empire by Constantine as sites physically marking the inexplicable dogmas of the…
Making Mobile Knowledges
In particular, it considers a series of voyages d'etude organized by the French scientific periodical Revue Générale des Sciences Pures et Appliquées between 1897 and 1914 that were open to the general public. It examines both the ways and the spaces in which knowledge was produced and the type of knowledge that was produced
Taking Sacred Space out of Place
Starting from a behind‐the‐scenes tour preceding the opening of the recent Getty exhibition Icons from Sinai, this article seeks to destabilize traditional notions of sacred space as a territorially fixed entity defined through a binary opposition to the profane. Icons and other ‘travelling’ sacred objects are regarded as vehicles for the circulation and displacement of holy places outside of their physical boundaries and for the reconfiguration …
Alexander the Great's Mountain
The metaphorical power of natural landscapes and geographical objects has attracted an increasing amount of critical interest. The myth of Dinocrates planning to carve Mount Athos into the figure of Alexander the Great epitomizes the complex relationship between the insistent materiality of prominent geographical features such as mountains and imagination. Through an iconographic reading of different renderings of the Dinocratic myth in western E…
Geo-strategy and the persistence of antiquity
Listening to the archive
Sound is a fundamental dimension of human experience. However, its ephemeral nature poses specific challenges to historical geographers and other scholars concerned with the study of the past. The last two decades have nonetheless witnessed an increased interest in the spatialities of historical sounds and acoustic environments in geography and across the humanities by large. This article offers a brief overview of some of this work. In particula…
Topia
Landscape is commonly deemed to be a western European Renaissance invention linked to the theorization of linear perspective as a distinctively “modern” way of looking at the world. Prompted by a resurging interest in premodern geographies, this article takes a step back and interrogates nonlinear perceptions and graphic representations of the environment in Roman antiquity (the so-called topia) and their development in the Byzantine world. Since…
Mapping a Holy Quasi‐Island
Mount Athos, the third finger of the Chalkidikē peninsula in northern Greece and a self‐governing monastic enclave for more than a thousand years, is a striking feature in Renaissance island books. In early isolarii it usually appeared in a round insular shape featuring four main monasteries—a representation that bears no resemblance to reality. Scholars have tended to dismiss these representations of Mount Athos as rudimentary and inaccurate. Th…
Denis Cosgrove, 'Uomo Universale
We have never been canonical
In responding to the commentaries on Keighren et al. (2012), we discuss in this paper the nature of memory and forgetfulness in geography and examine what the implications of active forgetting are for the stories we tell about geography and geographers. We explore the role which fashion plays in directing the course of the discipline and what this means for our engagement with the work of past geographers. Finally, we consider how notions of inhe…
From the Radio Shack to the Cosmos
Whereas literature on satellites and outer space exploration has usually been dominated by vision, humankind’s initial encounter with the Earth’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, was overwhelmingly sonic. Tracking was originally enabled by the signal continuously transmitted by its radio beacon. Embedded in the International Geophysical Year (IGY) citizen science programs, radio amateurs played a crucial role in receiving the signal and ass…
Light and sight
Beyond the Screen
This article offers a reflection on the concept of landscape through the work of Luigi Ghirri (1943–1992), one of the pioneers of contemporary Italian photography in the 1970s and 1980s. In Ghirri’s photographs, landscape operates as a surface and as a threshold, as a medium of exchange and as a way of seeing. Along with his many commentaries and essays on the subject, Ghirri’s photographs of landscape scenes, landscape screens, and landscape obj…
Mapping Global War
Writing on popular geographies has emphasized the shaping role of media. Newspapers and magazines, school texts, and atlases, had particular impacts on the twentieth century American geographical imagination, notably during World War II when news cartography became entwined with geopolitical mapping. The wartime mapmaker Richard Edes Harrison has been cited as exemplary of the role graphics played in promoting and popularizing an “air-age” geogra…
Alexander the Great's Mountain
The metaphorical power of natural landscapes and geographical objects has attracted an increasing amount of critical interest. The myth of Dinocrates planning to carve Mount Athos into the figure of Alexander the Great epitomizes the complex relationship between the insistent materiality of prominent geographical features such as mountains and imagination. Through an iconographic reading of different renderings of the Dinocratic myth in western E…
A Review of
The rhetoric of nostalgia
Memory, nostalgia and place are subjects of increasing scholarly interest. While invoked by cultural geographers as a 'productive force' moulding urban landscape, nostalgia often remains an unexamined, a priori concept. Through the exploration of different reactions to the spatialized history of postcolonial Alexandria, I consider nostalgia as a fluid, multifaceted, and performative force operating at different scales and levels: on one hand, an …
Geo-strategy and the persistence of antiquity
Putting the world into a box
Materiality, performance and mobility have recently attracted increasing interdisciplinary interest and called for new approaches to landscape. In most cases, however, these remain limited to the first meaning of landscape, as a complex of material/ visual forms in a given geographic area. By contrast, the second meaning of landscape, as a representation on different media, has remained out of such a debate. This article proposes a reconcep-tuali…
Mapping a Holy Quasi‐Island
Mount Athos, the third finger of the Chalkidikē peninsula in northern Greece and a self‐governing monastic enclave for more than a thousand years, is a striking feature in Renaissance island books. In early isolarii it usually appeared in a round insular shape featuring four main monasteries—a representation that bears no resemblance to reality. Scholars have tended to dismiss these representations of Mount Athos as rudimentary and inaccurate. Th…
Mountains and memory
Over the past few years, the relationship between landscape and the body as two physical entities mutually informed through performance has been increasingly interrogated by cultural geographers. Similar issues about memory, embodiment and performativity have been raised in the social sciences, yet often obliterating the material specificities of place and landscape. This paper reconsiders the relationship between landscape and memory in terms of…
Denis Cosgrove, 'Uomo Universale
Performative Atlases
Maps have traditionally been conceptualized as visual representations and studied for what they represent. In the past few years, however, scholars from different disciplines have started to approach them from new perspectives. Broadly speaking, art historians have shown increased interest in their materialities, and geographers and map historians in their social and performative aspects. This article reviews and synthesizes these approaches usin…
Denis Cosgrove (1948–2008)
Denis Cosgrove, Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and one of the leading cultural geographers of our time, passed away at his home in the Hollywood foo
Taking Sacred Space out of Place
Starting from a behind‐the‐scenes tour preceding the opening of the recent Getty exhibition Icons from Sinai, this article seeks to destabilize traditional notions of sacred space as a territorially fixed entity defined through a binary opposition to the profane. Icons and other ‘travelling’ sacred objects are regarded as vehicles for the circulation and displacement of holy places outside of their physical boundaries and for the reconfiguration …
Travelling landscape-objects
Over the past few years the notion of `landscape as a text' has been increasingly problematized. A number of experiments have been attempted to approach landscape via a revisited phenomenology. Landscape in the sense of graphic pictorial representation, however, has largely remained out of such debates. Reviewing and synthesizing work on landscape, materiality and performance, this article suggests some new directions for study. In particular, it…
Geography, religion, and emerging paradigms
This introduction to the subsequent forum addresses social and cultural geography's recent engagement with religion and spirituality. While representing a laudable and increasing willingness to approach religion/spirituality through sophisticated concepts and theories, this engagement should include more than just an imposition of the discipline's emerging paradigms on a new object of study. Geographers need to allow religion to 'speak back'. The…
Dreams so Big Only the Sea Can Hold Them
This paper explores a new phenomenon which is assuming global proportions: the planning and construction of artificial islands. Varying in size, shape, and purpose, man-made islands are looming on the horizons of an increasing number of aspiring global cities and regions at the margins of global capitalism. From the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea, from the Caribbean to the North Sea, artificial islands are increasingly embraced as spectacular, tec…
Aesthete of living
Engaging Sacred Space
This article reflects on the experience of theorizing sacred space through field practice as part of a fieldtrip to Barcelona. In particular, it focuses on the critical analysis of different approaches to sacred space as applied to various sites in the city. The article opens with a brief review of three mainstream approaches to sacred space: the ‘structuralist’, the ‘postmodern’ and the ‘more-than-representational’. It then reflects on the limit…
Scriptural Geography
Making Mobile Knowledges
In particular, it considers a series of voyages d'etude organized by the French scientific periodical Revue Générale des Sciences Pures et Appliquées between 1897 and 1914 that were open to the general public. It examines both the ways and the spaces in which knowledge was produced and the type of knowledge that was produced
Is geography the eye of (pre-modern) history? Looking back at and looking through medieval geographies
This commentary responds to Lilley's (2011) provocative suggestion to move away from periodizing geography and think instead in terms of spatial perceptions and representations across and within certain spatial and temporal contexts. In particular, it problematizes equations between medieval geographies and western or pre-modern geographies. It does so by situating western medieval geographies side by side other ‘pre-modern’ histories, and by con…
Anti-Landscapes
Caves occupy a special place in the Christian East. According to the Byzantine traditions, caves are the spaces where biblical paradoxical wonders took place, beyond human vision and understanding (from the birth of Christ from a virgin to his resurrection and the revelation to Saint John on Patmos). In the 4th century biblical caves were officially put on the map of empire by Constantine as sites physically marking the inexplicable dogmas of the…
On canonical geographies
Histories of geography are, by their very nature, selective enterprises. The apparent tendency of geographers to disparage particular periods of the discipline’s history, at the same time as exalting others, is characteristic of the way in which progress has been measured, relevance defined, and novelty identified. Yet, whilst other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences actively engage with their textual canons and founding figures, g…
We have never been canonical
In responding to the commentaries on Keighren et al. (2012), we discuss in this paper the nature of memory and forgetfulness in geography and examine what the implications of active forgetting are for the stories we tell about geography and geographers. We explore the role which fashion plays in directing the course of the discipline and what this means for our engagement with the work of past geographers. Finally, we consider how notions of inhe…
Setting and Blurring Boundaries
Geographies of Mars
GEOGRAPHIES OF MARS: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet. By K. MARIA D. LANE. xiii and 266 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780226470788. The word embeds a double act of inscription. Geo-graphein means or, more literally, writing, scratching the By interpreting the earth, geographers inscribe its surface with stories based on preexisting knowledge and experience. By describing it,…
Art (23 works) · History (23 works) · Philosophy (22 works) · History (21 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Geography (18 works) · Aesthetics (17 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Political science (13 works)