Martin Bressani Receives SSHRC Insight Grant

Prof. Martin Bressani has been awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant in the amount of $248,093 (over five years). The title of his research is “Architecture and the Environmental Tradition: The Atmospheric in British Architecture from 1750 to 1850.” The co-applicants on the project are Jodey C. Castricano (UBC), Marc Grignon (Laval), and Nicholas Roquet (U de M). The collaborators are Profs. Annmarie Adams and Aaron Sprecher, both of McGill.

“The research program investigates the rise of a new sensibility to ambiance, atmosphere, and aerial phenomena in British architecture and garden design between 1750 and 1850, in order to further our understanding of the concept of environment in its historical complexity. In our age of global warming, when the weather increasingly becomes a hybrid of the man-made and the natural, the history of a weather-borne aesthetics acquires special interest, identifying when and how the “air” became a locus of cultural politics. Our project seeks to define the stages and the precise modalities through which emerged an enhanced understanding of the connection between the physical properties of things, people, and space, and the emotional atmospheres they generate.” (Martin Bressani)

The full list of SSHRC Insight Grant winners for 2012 can be found here.