Extinction: 2023-2024
The “Extinction” speaker series delved into the visual and material representations of Earth’s dwindling biodiversity, examining the historical contexts behind the treatment of living organisms as natural resources, commodities, and objects of aesthetic or scientific inquiry.
When did efforts for preservation and extinction management begin? How have visual and material culture mediated, naturalized, challenged, and responded to human-induced species extinction?
Internationally renowned practitioners of ecocriticism from fields such as art history, history, and media studies will engage with these questions, probing the interdisciplinary intersections of art, ecology, and the politics of representation.
Claire Farago
Professor Emerita, University of Colorado at Boulder
Thursday, April 4, 2024
Taking Responsibility in the Age of Capital: How the European Discourse on Art Shaped Accounts of Human Exceptionalism
Jonathan Saha
Professor of History at Durham University
Friday, March 29, 2024
Decolonising Animals: Burmese Elephants and the End of Empire
Faisal Husain
Assistant Professor of History at Penn State
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
Hunting Too Much: Case Studies of Joy and Remorse from Early Modern Turkey, Iran, and India
Prof. Helen Cowie
Professor of Early Modern History, The University of York, UK
Wednesday, March 6, 2024
Crocodile Tears and Fur Seals: Consumption, Conservation and Cruelty in the Fur Seal Fisheries of Alaska, c.1870-1914
Dr. Dolly Jørgensen
Professor of History, University of Stavanger, Norway
Thursday, October 26, 2023
Extinction, Memory, Remembrance, Emotions
Dr. Maurice Saß
Professor of Art History, Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences, Alfter, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Thursday, November 2, 2023
Art and Violence: The Hunts of Peter Paul Rubens
Dr. Thomas Balfe
Lecturer in 13th to 17th Century History of Art, The Warburg Institute, University of London
Monday, November 13, 2023
Signs of life? Regarding animal violence in early modern still life painting