Olivia Badoi
Scholar of literary and visual modernism, graphic narrative, and the environmental humanities.
My work explores how modernist writers and artists used the materials of their craft — wood, ink, paper, the printed page — to reimagine the human relationship with the more-than-human world. My first book, Arboreal Modernism and the Woodcut Book, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025.
Arboreal Modernism and the Woodcut Book
A study of how modernist artists across Europe and the United States turned to trees and wood — as subject and as material — to reimagine the human relationship with the natural world.
Through close readings of woodcut novels by Lynd Ward, Frans Masereel, Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichová and others, the book argues that the resurgence of relief printing in the early twentieth century was not nostalgic craft revival but a distinctly modernist environmental imagination — one that registered the violence of industrial forestry while insisting on the expressive possibility of wood itself.