Professor Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology & Gender Studies, Columbia University, USA is the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professor for the Lent term 2025.
Professor Povinelli’s Visiting Professorship Lecture, 'Alice Henry and the Collapse of the Western Plateau' was held in the Frankopan Hall, West Court, Jesus College, Cambridge on Thursday 27 February 2025. Our sincere thanks to Professor Povinelli for an inspiring lecture and to our colleagues at West Court for their assistance in hosting the lecture.
Lecture abstract:
The lecture grounds itself in the speculative science fiction novel and artistic work that Professor Povinelli is currently completing, Alice Henry and the Collapse of the Western Plateau, to ask what would the corporeal future of humans, and their gendered diversity, be in the wake of a massive planetary collapse. Set in the ancestral future, the book follows the protagonist, a small child found in the debris of a great fire in a sector of the western plateau, as she is interrogated in various subterranean and superterranean landscapes about the meaning of a narrative she neither seems to be in charge of nor is able to discharge herself from. Composed of prose fiction, serious and doggerel poetry, and pencil and ink drawings, AHCWP means to interrogate the present nature of western disciplinary knowledges as terraforming machinery.