Big science is the big gorilla on most campuses. Some humanists hope to join forces with scientists, melding research projects and supplying data for computer models. Maybe this makes sense when the challenges are as systemic as the Anthropocene, but there are dangers too. This workshop discusses the Anthropocene and the ways humanists and scientists can (and can’t) work together as we attempt to understand Earth’s transformation from the relatively stable Holocene epoch of the past 11,700 years to our new, destabilized, irreversible, and unpredictably evolving planetary state. RSVP here! RSVPs are appreciated but not required. 

Julia Adeney Thomas is professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. Her primary areas of research are the intellectual history of Japan, photography as a political practice, and the challenge of the Anthropocene concept to theories of history.  She is the author of Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Ideology; Strata and Three Human Stories; and The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach, written with geologists Mark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz and translated into four languages.

This event is cosponsored by the Asian Studies Center, Climate and Global Change Center, and Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation.