Friday, November 16 at 2:00pm,

The Franke Institute for the Humanities

Benjamin Morgan (University of Chicago) will join Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern University) and Corey Byrnes (Northwestern University) as they consider how exhaustion or exhaustiveness figures into the content, practice, or theory of their research and professional duties.

Benjamin Morgan is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago. His areas of research include science and literature in nineteenth-century Britain and the environmental humanities. His first book, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2017), explores how early scientific studies of the human mind transformed ideas about the human experience of the arts. His current book project, In Human Scale: The Aesthetics of Climate Change traces how literature and the visual arts developed formal strategies for depicting large-scale ecological systems at the early industrial moment of the climate change era.

Kelly Wisecup is Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University, where she is also Co-Director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research.  She is the author of Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (2013); editor of a scholarly edition of Edward Winslow’s 1624 Good News from New England (2014); and co-editor of a recent special journal issue on the relations between Native American Studies & Early American Studies.  Her current book project, Assembled Relations: Compilation, Collection, and Native American Writing, examines how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Native writers intervened into anthropological sciences.

Corey Byrnes is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Culture at Northwestern University. His interdisciplinary and comparative research engages with Chinese literature and visual culture, Sinophone cinema, the environmental humanities, cultural geography and animal studies, among other areas. His first book, Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges (Columbia University Press, December 2018), which was recently awarded Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asia Institute’s “Best First Book Prize,” traces a selective history and maps an aesthetic geography of the Three Gorges over the course of 2500 years from the perspective of the recently completed Three Gorges Dam project. The story it tells investigates but goes beyond narratives of loss and displacement to locate the horizon of possibility for the dam project as a form of landscape best understood in relation to the aesthetic traditions it seems to sever. Poems may not build dams, but the Three Gorges Dam would not exist without them. Byrnes’ newest work examines the depiction of exhausted bodies and the revival of “exhausted” aesthetic forms in the depiction of social and environmental problems in contemporary China as well as the the global rhetoric of threat that so often defines China in contemporary global discourse.