Megan Fossa

A lecture in the “Presence of the Past Series” with Nathan Hensley, associate professor of English at Georgetown University. When Alice falls into Wonderland in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic, she wonders how anything in the world will ever feel normal again. In this lecture, Hensley draws on the experience of Alice and other 19th-century literary […]

Roughly the last three decades of British rule in South Asia produced a host of new scientific ways, such as serology and statistical analysis, for determining the identities of humans. British administrator-ethnographers, however, were no longer the primary users of these new scientific methods. Rather, South Asian scientists now enthusiastically embraced these techniques. Their objective […]

Reading Elizabeth Bishop’s The Sandpiper along with William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence, this talk by Wai Chee Dimock makes a case for the continuing resonances of two poets who, writing before climate change was an available term, nonetheless spoke to the vulnerabilities of the planet — of humans and nonhumans — in a way newly meaningful […]

If sexology, the science of sex, came into being sometime in the 19th century, then how did statesmen, scientists, and everyday people make meaning out of sex before that point? In this talk, Greta LaFleur, assistant professor of American studies at Yale University, explores how 18th-century natural history — the study of organic life in […]

Lives of organisms are shaped by their social interactions, including those with other individuals of the same species, as well as with individuals of different species. These interactions affect how our genomes evolve so that current patterns of DNA sequence variation from genomes can be used to detect past evolutionary events. Using the social amoeba […]

In 1807 the London surgeon and anatomist Charles Bell was called by his friend Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin, to view the friezes of the Parthenon, recently brought to London, having been taken from their original home in Greece. Bell was asked to assess the statues as an anatomist and to analyze their representations […]

Heather Streets-Salter’s (Northeastern University) research focuses on world history, the structure of empires and colonial relationships, and the scholarship of pedagogy. She is the author of World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (2017), Empires and Colonies in the Modern World (2010) with Trevor Getz, Martial Races: […]

The Center for the Arts and Humanities is delighted to announce that Roxane Gay will be the keynote speaker for this year’s humanities theme, Presence of the Past. Roxane’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short […]

Elle Hearns is an organizer, speaker, strategist, and writer. Elle is a cofounding member of the Black Lives Matter network, an organization formed with multiple local chapters as a political project in the wake of the murder of Trayvon Martin in order to explicitly combat implicit bias and anti-black racism and to protect and affirm […]

Historical marine ecology has revealed long-term, and previously unknown, changes to marine species and ecosystems, providing information vital for managing and conserving marine resources. This talk will use examples from diverse taxonomic groups to demonstrate the ways that historical data can be mobilized to better assess long-term ecological change and the ways in which historical […]

The night sky is filled with stars and galaxies whose light was emitted at different times throughout the entire 13.6 billion-year history of the universe. Each one provides us with a snapshot in time, which we can use collectively to gain insight into some of the most fundamental questions about the nature of the universe. […]

The politics of global climate change mark the many intricate ways in which modern societies depend on energy. Political attempts at tackling the human causes of climate change concern the generation, distribution, and consumption of energy in society, and in doing so, seem to question the very grounds of how we live. Since the early […]

Language is a constant dialectic between energy and exhaustion: as new words and expressions come into use, others pass away. While dynamic is ongoing, few periods in the English language have witnessed as much, and as rapid, change as the early 16th century, which saw the demise of what we now term Middle English, and […]

How do we become attached to places, things, and other beings? How might aesthetic objects participate in the formation of attachments between humans and nonhumans, culture, and energy? In this talk, Tommy Davis, associate professor of English at Ohio State University, will address the making and unmaking of attachment in the Anthropocene. He’ll take up […]

Bess Koffman, assistant professor of geology, studies past changes in Earth’s climate system using a combination of field and laboratory approaches. She is interested primarily in understanding how and why the atmospheric circulation has changed through time and the impacts these changes have had on terrestrial and marine environments. Earth’s atmospheric circulation influences large-scale climate […]

What would happen if there was a source of energy that was never exhausted? Our everyday experience would suggest it is impossible to have a limitless supply of anything. However, one of the most uncomfortable conclusions in modern astrophysics is that we live in a universe that seems to be suffused with a limitless and […]

How do we deal with cultural materials that no longer suit our needs/beliefs/political inclinations? Over the summer, a school board in San Francisco voted to cover up, but not paint over, a series of WPA era murals depicting George Washington, which include scenes that some viewers now consider offensive. While the removal of school murals […]

Paul Vangelisti is the author of more than 30 books of poetry, as well as being a noted translator from Italian. In 2010 his translation of Adriano Spatola’s The Position of Things: Collected Poems, 1961-1992 won an Academy of American Poets Prize. From 1971 to 1982 he was coeditor, with John McBride, of the literary […]

Cinema is a powerful assemblage that activates people and things and sets them into motion. At the same time, a vast ecology of off-screen practices also participates in cinema’s dynamic logics. As an employer, cinema has the power to put bodies to work. The cine-ecology is at once energized and consumed by practices required to […]

One visible effect of fossil fuel energy consumption is the emission of gases and particles into the atmosphere. These emissions include not only carbon dioxide, but also a wide range of other reactive gases. But anthropogenic processes are not the only sources of atmospheric emissions. Many natural systems, including the oceans, volcanoes, and plants, also […]

Belief in free will, operationalized as the ability to freely choose one’s own actions and determine one’s own outcomes, is the embodiment of energy and exhaustion. Belief in free will can energize us, instilling the notion that we are active agents in our social world. Disbelief in free will can exhaust us by dampening our […]

This talk by Samia Rahimtoola of Bowdoin College reads Dawn Lundy Martin’s Discipline (2011) and Ed Roberson’s City Eclogue (2006) in order to uncover the social and environmental forms of relation that appear under conditions of racialized gentrification. Both books refuse easy narratives of individual overcoming, bodily cure, and environmental repair, instead proposing a catalogue […]

Dale Kocevski, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, focuses his research on the study of distant galaxies that host actively accreting supermassive black holes, otherwise known as active galactic nuclei (AGN). There is mounting evidence that the evolution of galaxies is closely linked to the growth of their central black holes, but how this connection […]

In the furthest reaches of our planet, in a stark desert landscape where humanity is broken, and everyone is fighting for the necessities of life, there are two rebels who just might be able to restore order — Max (Tom Hardy), a man of action and few words, who seeks peace of mind following the […]

A dream of dark and troubling things…. David Lynch’s 1977 debut feature, Eraserhead, is both a lasting cult sensation and a work of extraordinary craft and beauty. With its mesmerizing black-and-white photography by Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell, evocative sound design, and unforgettably enigmatic performance by Jack Nance, this visionary nocturnal odyssey continues to haunt […]