HI Distinguished Guest Lecture

The UCD Humanities Institute is delighted to invite you to a workshop by Prof. Marek Tamm (Tallinn University, Estonia and Visiting Fellow at the UCD Humanities Institute) on his new research project on “historical futures”.

20 Oct. 5-6pm - HI Distinguished Guest Lecture, "Being in the Air: A Short History of Climate Modulation”, Professor Eva Horn (University of Vienna)

Format: in person

Date: 20th October, Time: 5-6pm

Please register for free on(opens in a new window) Eventbrite

Please bring your booking form and proof of vaccination.

The Speaker

Eva Horn is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on literature and art in the age of the Anthropocene; climate literature; modelling the future in literature and science; narratives of catastrophe; political secrets, conspiracy, treason. She is author of The Future as Catastrophe. Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age, New York: Columbia University Press 2018, with Hannes Bergthaller: The Anthropocene. Key Issues for the Humanities, New York/London: Routledge 2019; The Secret War. Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 2013

The Talk

Current conceptualizations of climate and climate change are dominated by the abstract idea of climate as “the average weather.” This scientific understanding, I will argue, must be complemented by a cultural concept of climate which has a long tradition from Antiquity to the Enlightenment. In order to understand what it means to „be in the air“ culturally, politically, and medically, we need a cultural understanding of climate as an environment.  My talk will give a few historical and literary examples of what it might mean to understand the air from the inside, as an element of individual, social, and cultural life.