Nuclear disasters. Acid rain. The mass extinction of animal and plant species. The devastating environmental crisis that the planet faces today has fundamentally transformed the way we perceive human interaction with the natural environment. New forms of thinking such as postcolonial ecophilosophy, actor-network theory, new materialisms, evolutionary-developmental aesthetics, and posthumanism have challenged Enlightenment distinctions between natural and human history. Can art history, a discipline primarily engaged in the study of human creativity, also breach the natural/human history binary? What would such a history of art and architecture look like? Inescapably located in deep time, the ecological is omnidirectional and rhizomatic in its scalarity. Therefore, rather than focusing on specific sites or temporal periods, the conference seeks to explore the interconnected ecologies of planetary systems and art and architecture practices across a longue durée. It aims to bring forth the genealogies, methodologies, practices, and horizons of ecologically-oriented art, architecture, and visual histories.

Sponsors: University of California Humanities Research Institute; Institute of International Studies; Department of History of Art; Institute for South Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

Speakers: Lamia Balafrej (University of California, Los Angeles), Elisabeth de Bièvre (University of East Anglia), Whitney Davis (University of California, Berkeley), Natasha Eaton (University College London), Anthony Grudin (University of Vermont), Meredith Hoy (Arizona State University), Monica Juneja (Universität Heidelberg), Riad Kherdeen (University of California, Berkeley), Gregory Levine (University of California, Berkeley), Ramón De Santiago (University of California, Berkeley), Shivani Sud (University of California, Berkeley), Sugata Ray (University of California, Berkeley), Ivonne del Valle (University of California, Berkeley).

Organizers: Sugata Ray and Whitney Davis, Department of History of Art, University of California, Berkeley.

For conference program and paper abstracts see here.