Staff profile

Janet Stewart took up the post of Professor of Visual Culture and German in 2014 and upon appointment became the founding Director of the Centre for Visual Arts and Culture.

From 2015 - 2018, she served as Head of School of Modern Languages and Cultures.

Professor Stewart holds a Ph.D in German and Sociology from the University of Glasgow. In 1995, she was awarded a Junior Fellowship at the International Research Centre for Cultural Sciences in Vienna and in 1997-1998 she held a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Studentship at the Karl-Eberhardts-Universität Tübingen. Between 1998 and 2013, she was Lecturer and, latterly, Senior Lecturer in German and Film & Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen, where she founded a Masters programme in Visual Culture.

Professor Stewart is the author of two monographs, Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos’s Cultural Criticism (2000) and Public Speaking in the City (2009) and has published widely on Austrian and German literature and visual culture, cultural sociology and urban history.

Her current research project develops her interests in modernity and visual culture in a new context, connecting them to the study of energy and, more specifically, petroleum. She is working on a research monograph, ‘Curating Europe’s Oil’, which explores the role that oil plays in twenty-first century cultural memory, and writes a related blog on Energy and Culture. She is also co-editing, with Graeme MacDonald (Warwick) a Routledge Handbook of Energy Humanities.

In 2012, she curated an international exhibition on ‘OilScapes’ at Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen, on whose curatorial board she served from 2006-2012. She also served on the Advisory Board of ‘Capturing the Energy’, a multi-partner initiative to document Scotland’s energy history, and is an associate member of the ‘Petrocultures’ Research Group' at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. 

Together with Graeme MacDonald (Warwick) and Rhys Williams (Glasgow), she organised the Third International Petrocultures Conference which took place at the University of Glasgow in 2018. She was also the co-organiser of a workshop on 'Decarbonized Futures' that took place at the Lorentz Centre, Leiden in 2017.

She is currently part of an international collaborative research project funded by the Swedish Reserach Council investigating Climate Imaginaries.

• 2019: Editor of German Life and Letters:
• 2014: Member of the Advisory Board for the Austrian Studies Yearbook, published by W. S. Maney under the aegis of the MHRA (since 2001):
• 2014: Member of AHRC Peer Review College (2012 - present):
• 2014: Member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Austrian Studies (US) (2012-2015):
• 2005: Secretary and Treasurer of the Scottish Conference of University Teachers of German (SCUTG) [Feb 2002 - May 2005):

Authored book

• Group, P. R. (2016). After Oil. West Virginia University Press
• Stewart, J. C. (2009). Public Speaking in the City: Debating and Shaping the Urban Experience. Palgrave Macmillan
• Stewart, J. C. (2000). Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos's Cultural Criticism. Routledge

Chapter in book

• Stewart, J. C. (2017). Resource Curse. In I. Szeman, J. Wenzel, & P. Yaeger (Eds.), Fueling culture: 101 words for energy and environment (285-288). Fordham University Press
• Stewart, J. (2016). Visual Culture Studies and Cultural Sociology: Extractive Seeing. In D. Inglis, & A. Almali (Eds.), The Sage handbook of cultural sociology (322-334). SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473957886.n23
• Stewart, J. C. (2006). Exhibiting and Communicating Berlin around 1900. In D. Midgley, C. Emden, & C. Keen (Eds.), Imagining the City, Volume Two: The Politics of Urban Space (193-215). Peter Lang
• Stewart, J. C. (2006). Conflict, Compromise and Resistance: Popular Culture in Austria, 1918-1945. In R. Robertson, & K. Kohl (Eds.), History of Austrian Literature 1918-1945 (87-106). Camden House
• Stewart, J. C. (2005). Reconstructing the Centre: Sociology and Architecture in the New Berlin. In D. Inglis, & J. Hughson (Eds.), The Sociology of Art (183-212). Palgrave Macmillan
• Stewart, J. C. (2005). Connecting and Locating Culture. In J. C. Stewart, & S. Ward (Eds.), Blueprints for No-Man's Land. Connections in Contemporary Austrian Culture (9-28). Peter Lang
• Stewart, J. C. (2004). A Taste of Vienna: food as a signifier of urban modernity in Vienna 1890–1930. In A. Cowan, & J. Steward (Eds.), The City and the Senses: Urban Culture Since 1500. Ashgate Publishing
• Stewart, J. C. (2003). Raum und Raumwahrnehmung in den dramatischen Werken Arthur Schnitzlers. In K. Fliedl (Ed.), Arthur Schnitzler im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (105-119). Picus Verlag
• Stewart, J. C. (2002). The Kunsthaus Tacheles: The Berlin Architecture Debate in Micro-Historical Context. In S. Taberner, & F. Finlay (Eds.), Recasting German Identity: Culture, Politics and Literature in the Berlin Republic. Camden House
• Stewart, J. C. (2002). The World of the Waltz. Dance and Non-Contemporaneity in Schnitzler's Texts. In F. Krobb, & I. Foster (Eds.), Arthur Schnitzler: Zeitgenossenschaften/Contemporaneities. Peter Lang
• Stewart, J. C. (2002). The Written City. Literary Representations of Vienna at the Turn of the Centuries. In E. Grabovszki, & J. Hardin (Eds.), Literature in Vienna at the Turn of the Centuries. Continuities and Discontinuities Around 1900 and 2000 (27-49). Camden House

Conference Paper

• Stewart, J. C. (2010). Flows of Capital Between Energy Cities - paper presented at the World Energy Cities Partnership Conference held in Perth, Australia.

Edited book

• Stewart, J. C., & Ward, S. (Eds.). (2005). Blueprints for No-Man's Land: Connections in Contemporary Austrian Culture. Peter Lang

Journal Article

• Stewart, J. C. (2014). Sociology, Culture and Energy: The Case of Wilhelm Ostwald's 'Sociological Energetics' - A Translation and Exposition of a Classic Text. Cultural Sociology, 8(3), 333-350. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975514523937
• Stewart, J. C. (2013). Making Globalization Visible?: The Oil Assemblage, the Work of Sociology and the Work of Art. Cultural Sociology, 7, 368-384. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975512453663
• Stewart, J. C. (2013). Filming Vienna 1900: The Poetics of Cinema and the Politics of Ornament in Raúl Ruiz's Klimt. Journal of Austrian studies, 46(2), 49-79. https://doi.org/10.1353/oas.2013.0027
• Stewart, J. C. (2007). 'Breaking the Power of the Past over the Present': Psychology, Utopianism, and the Frankfurt School. Utopian Studies, 18(1), 21-42
• Stewart, J. C. (2002). Nicht die Kunst darf sich vereinnahmen lassen': Franzobel, Literature and Politics in the 'New Austria. German Life and Letters, 55(2), 219-233. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0483.00226
• Stewart, J. C. (1999). Georg Simmel at the Lectern. Body & Society, 5(4), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x99005004001
• Stewart, J. C. (1998). Talking of Modernity: The Viennese Vortrag as Form. German Life and Letters, 51(4), 455-469. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0483.00110