Brandon O. Scott

Brandon O. Scott is a doctoral student in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture Program. His primary interests are the aesthetics of nature, theories of landscape, forest history and writing. Together these themes form the interpretative context for his dissertation, The American Grove: A 19th Century Vegetal Aesthetic, which attempts to recover the ways in which three trees—American elm, longleaf pine and bald cypress—and their related communities—New Englanders, turpentine orchard workers and maroon groups—together co-created distinct landscapes out of the land imagined to be, labored towards and at times resisted as being called America in the 19th century.

During the 2023-2024 academic year he is one of the inaugural recipients of the ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovative Award. For the 2024-2025 academic year he will be a Smithsonian Institution Fellow working across the collections of the American Art Museum, the National Museum of Natural History and the African American History and Culture Museum. Before MIT, he earned an MA in Art History from the Williams College Graduate Program and prior to that a BA in Aesthetics (Independent Concentration) and Certificate in Urban Studies from Princeton University.

When not reading or writing about landscapes, he can likely be found in them, especially swamps, bottomlands and piney woods.