French Natures-Conference-Festival

As Emmanuel Macron’s call to “Make the Planet Great Again” reminds us, there is a cultural aspect to climate change—each culture maps its understanding of the physical world (nature, physis) in different ways. This conference-festival titled “French Natures” thus asks: what do French and Francophone literature, film, visual art, theater, and philosophy make of our planet? How can they help us understand our world marked by environmental catastrophe?

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26

9:30 a.m.  Opening Words
Frédérique Aït-Touati and Phillip John Usher 
Sarah Kay (Professor and Chair of French Literature, Thought and Culture, and Director of the NYU Center for French Language and Cultures)
Carolyn Dinshaw (Silver Professor; Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and English; NYU Dean for Humanities)

10:00-11:15 a.m.  Our Troubled Planet. Chair: Phillip John Usher (NYU)
The World on Fire. Peggy McCracken (University of Michigan)
Dialectics of Meteors. Frédéric Neyrat (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

11:30 a.m.-1:15 p.m.  Smokiness and Lightness
Visualizing the Nature of Northern French Smokestacks from Dubigny to Pissarro. Daniel Finch-Race (Bristol University)
The Unbearable Lightness of Ecology. Pauline Goul (Vassar College)

2:30-4:15 p.m.  Fields and Beaches. Chair: Peder Anker (Gallatin, NYU)
Being on Earth, or The Cosmic Agriculture. Emanuele Coccia (EHESS)
Queer Ecology and the Modernist Beach. Hannah Freed-Thall (NYU)

4:30-5:30 p.m.  Knowing and Making: Material Imaginaries of the Early Modern. Pamela H. Smith (Columbia University)

7:30 p.m.  U.S. première of Bruno Latour’s spectacle-conférence “Inside”
Location: The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, 480 W. 42nd Street
(A ticket must be purchased for this show that will take place off-campus. For details, go to: frenchnatures.org/latours-inside. To purchase tickets, click here.)

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27

9:30-10:00 a.m.  Reading of Olivier Kemeid’s Aeneid. Directed by Judy Miller (NYU) and Rachel Watson (NYU)

10:15 a.m.-11:45 a.m.  Theatrical Natures Roundtable. Chair: Judy Miller (NYU)
Featuring Frédérique Aït-Touati (CRAL [EHESS, CNRS]), Una Chaudhuri (NYU), Sarah Cameron Sunde (director, New York)

12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m.  Outing to Earth Room with Robin Joyce. The Earth Room has been open to the public (for free) since 1980. (If interested, meet outside La Maison Française at 12:00 p.m. or go directly to 141 Wooster Street. Details and directions here.)

1:45-3:15 p.m.  Territories (1). Chair: Hannah Freed-Thall (NYU)

Paysages de  France et paysage français dans la littérature (française) du XX ème siècle. Eugène Nicole (NYU)
Theological-Political Arborescences: Louis Dorléans’s La plante humaine. Rose Gardner(Columbia University)

3:30-4:45 p.m.  Territories (2). Chair: Jeanne Etelain (NYU)
Wild Diplomacy. Cohabiting With the Others Among Us. Baptiste Morizot (Université Aix-Marseille)
On the Exterranean. Phillip John Usher (NYU)

5:00-6:45 p.m.  Future Perspectives for Cohabitation on the Earth. Chair: Sarah Kay (NYU)
French Zoopoetics: Animals at the Intersection of Nature, Language, and Ethics. Anne Simon (CRAL [EHESS, CNRS])
Ferality in the Arts: Visualizing the Next Nature. Bénédicte Ramade
Reading Ecologically with Posthuman Cultures. Stéphanie Posthumus (McGill University)

Program is subject to last-minute changes; for full and up-to-date details, go to: frenchnatures.org

All conference events are free, open to the public, and take place at La Maison Française, unless otherwise noted.
Most sessions will be in English.

Sponsored by The Cultural Services of the French Embassy; NYU Center for French Language and Cultures; The Florence Gould Foundation; Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture NYU; Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage (EHESS, CNRS); NYU Center for the Humanities; La Maison Française NYU