Fenimore Art Museum Presents a Virtual Lecture on Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Coming of Age in Europe

Join noted scholar Rochelle L. Johnson for a lecture exploringSusan Fenimore Cooper’s coming of age in Europe and how it kindled her environmental understanding of New World landscapes.

Live Zoom Lecture with Q&A:
Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Youth in Europe: The Making of Environmental Understanding
Thursday, May 1, 2025 • 7:00-8:00 p.m. EST
Free • Registration is required, visit FenimoreArt.org

Susan Fenimore Cooper

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown presents Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Youth in Europe: The Making of Environmental Understanding—a live, virtual lecture with researcher and professor Rochelle L. Johnson, taking place on Thursday, May 1, from 7:00-8:00 p.m. via Zoom.The presentation explores Susan Fenimore Cooper’s coming of age in Europe, where her family lived for seven years. Through frescoes and ruins, castles and museums, Cooper learned important lessons, especially concerning the nature of time. We will tour a small bit of Europe alongside Cooper, considering how the Old World lessons she gleaned kindled her later environmental understanding of New World landscapes. The program features a live Q&A session. Registration is required.

To register, visit FenimoreArt.org. A link to the lecture will be provided to all registrants 24 hours prior to the start of the program via the e-mail address used during registration.  All participants will need Zoom installed on their computer or mobile device to join. There is no charge for this event, but if you value this type of program, please consider a donation of $20 or more to assist Fenimore in continuing to provide you with interesting content in the future.

About Rochelle L. Johnson

Rochelle L. Johnson is a creative writer, a scholar, and an educator, and she holds the Bernie McCain Chair in the Humanities at the College of Idaho, where she teaches courses in the environmental humanities and in writing. Rochelle’s scholarship on 19th-century landscape aesthetics appears in a variety of journals and collections. She is the author of Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America’s Aesthetics of Alienation, which situates the environmental writings of Susan Fenimore Cooper amid the landscape philosophies of Cooper’s era. Rochelle also has co-edited five books, including three dedicated to Cooper’s work and the 2021 anthology, Thoreau in an Age of Crisis: New Essays on an American Icon. Her scholarly research has been supported by the Idaho Humanities Council, Yale University’s Beinecke Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded her a research fellowship toward her current book. A former president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, she is also Immediate Past President of the Thoreau Society. Learn more at: https://www.rochelleljohnson.com.

About Fenimore Art Museum

Fenimore Art Museum, located on the shores of Otsego Lake—James Fenimore Cooper’s “Glimmerglass”—in historic Cooperstown, New York, presents changing exhibitions each season. Past shows have featured artists such as Keith Haring, Ansel Adams, Banksy, M.C. Escher, and many others. The museum features a wide-ranging collection of American art including folk art; important American 18th- and 19th-century landscape, genre, and portrait paintings from artists including Albert Bierstadt, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Frederic Edwin Church, Childe Hassam, Martin Johnson Heade, Robert Henri, George Inness, Eastman Johnson, Joshua Johnson, Thomas Moran, Georgia O’Keeffe, Maurice Prendergast, John Singer Sargent, Max Weber, and James McNeill Whistler; more than 125,000 historic photographs representing the technical developments made in photography and providing extensive visual documentation of the region’s unique history; and the renowned Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art comprised of nearly 900 art objects representative of a broad geographic range of North American Indian cultures, from the Northwest Coast, Eastern Woodlands, Plains, Southwest, Great Lakes, and Prairie regions. Visit FenimoreArt.org.