Faculty Supervisor: Katia Arfara
My project, “Being in Time: Aestheses of the Anthropocene,” was an open-ended research experience at the intersections of art history, performance studies, and literary studies. Using the title as a thematic container, I wrote multiple papers on a range of interrelated subjects, including aesthetics, policy, comparative racialization, and Anthropocene discourse. Aspects of the project involved critical explorations of the IPCC Assessments (1990-2023), climate change-induced habitat shifts, the works of Ursula Le Guin and Jamaica Kincaid, gestures and graphs, and the philosophical potential of tenderness in inter-community solidarity. These papers were presented at a number of conferences, ranging from the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting in Chicago to the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs Conference in Seoul. Additionally, I wrote a 9,500-word research paper titled “This Flesh of Time: A Phenomenology of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s ‘Dioramas’,” which examined the relationship between photography, movement, and phenomenology, and is currently being revised for submission to journals in my fields of interest.