We are pleased to invite you to the fifth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025 Spring semester!
Anindita Banerjee
(Cornell University)
The Science and Art of Nabokov’s Atmospherics
Thursday, May 15, 2025
at 4:45 p.m.
You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.
Where?
Dobra 55, room 2.118
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
What?
Unfolding America Between Place and Planet: Vladimir Nabokov’s Science Fictions. Vladimir Nabokov’s legacy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, is not limited to the world-famous literary works he produced in the place where I have lived and worked for many years now. The natural and built environments of the campus and its surrounding region were crucial for his lifelong pursuit of butterflies within their geo- and biodiverse ecosystems across deep time and planetary space. In this talk, I will reflect on the lepidopterist-writer’s “unfolding” of an altogether different America than what human trajectories of migration would suggest for the life of a lifelong refugee—a perpetually genre-defying corpus of “science fictions” poised at multitudinous interfaces at which human and beyond-human worlds converge, collide, collapse, and configure each other.
Who?
Anindita Banerjee’s work focuses on science fiction studies, environmental studies, media studies, and migration studies across Russia, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Latin and African Americas. She is particularly interested in networks of exchange, innovation, production, and consumption that develop outside conventional coordinates along which we imagine and talk about the modern world.
