Upcoming Events

Inspired by the literary concept of the unreliable narrator and the medieval bestiary, The Unreliable Bestiary is an ark of stories about animals, humans, and planet Earth. With a team of award-winning collaborators, Deke Weaver’s life-long project is presenting a performance for every letter of the alphabet—each letter representing an…

In 1988, American climate modeler James Hansen testified in the US Congress that he and his team were 99% certain that man-made global warming was underway. Hansen’s testimony reflected decades of sustained scientific work predicting that burning fossil fuels would cause climate change; now, in 1988, he was saying that change was no longer a prediction, but a fact.

Hansen’s testimony…

Please join us as for this special evening with U.S. Poet Laureate, Ada Limón. Part conversation and part poetry reading, the event follows Limón as she shares with us how poetry connects us to the world, allows us to heal, to love, to grieve, and reminds us of the full spectrum of human emotion.

Support for this event provided in part by Dr. Daniel D. Shin

Hosted by: Literatures…

In this talk Antoinette Burton repurposes Samantha Frost’s definition of the biocultural for use in the context of 19th-century British imperial politics. Framing empire itself as biocultural shifts the emphasis from the fiction of humans’ sovereignty toward their interdependence with the nonhuman animal and its habitats. The Victorian “parliament of animals” archive that Burton draws on is a…

Food for Thought: A Center for Advanced Study public events series featuring presentations of research and creative projects by recent CAS Associates and Fellows.

We are delighted to showcase the work of some of our most productive and creative faculty in this informal series of intellectually and spiritually invigorating presentations. You are invited to drop in when you can…

11:00am, Sonali Shah, The Fruits of One’s Labor: Uncovering the Factors that Shape Sustained Technology Adoption Behaviors

Post-harvest loss is a critical problem: as food travels from farms to markets to tables, one-third spoils before it is consumed. Interventions designed to reduce post-harvest loss require farmers to adopt specific technologies and use those technologies…

In 2010, an oil pipeline transporting diluted bitumen from Alberta, Canada ruptured near Marshall, Michigan, spilling over a million gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River. This talk takes the Marshall spill as an occasion to examine some of the paradoxes of our current global energy infrastructure impasse. What happened in Michigan in 2010 is just one iteration of a much longer, deeper,…

Food for Thought: A Center for Advanced Study public events series featuring presentations of research and creative projects by recent CAS Associates and Fellows.

We are delighted to showcase the work of some of our most productive and creative faculty in this informal series of intellectually and spiritually invigorating presentations. You are invited to drop in when you can…

Jody Sperling considers the dynamic conversation between technology and nature as played out in the performance art of Loïe Fuller (1862-1928) and her own Fuller-inspired creations. Considered a technological wizardress, Fuller advanced the technologies of lighting and projection design often for the effect of conjuring natural elements onstage. Sperling has been furthering Fuller's idiom into…

Professor Ruth Behar‘s lecture will move between the personal essay and poetry, history and ethnography, exile and diaspora, and the role of the sea in remembrances of Sefarad in such places as Istanbul, Havana, Miami, New York, and Seattle. She will discuss the idea of dreaming about Sefarad and the dilemma of how to tell the story of waking from the dream to the loss of Sefarad. She will…