Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

Cecilia Seilern und Aspang is researching the intersection between the appreciation of natural resources and the need to improve and imitate them. She's doing this by looking at the imitation of gemstones, and at the moment, more specifically, natural agate, through agate glass, in the 17th century. In her work, Cecilia tries to understand relationships between gemstones, their constructed value, the efforts taken to improve them and the act of imitating them, and what this can tell us more about the human relationship to natural resources.