The Vital Perspectives on Healthcare and Science series engages with some of the most pressing public health issues of our time, in a regular public forum catalyzed by a book.
This May event will feature Dr. Stefan Helmreich, author of A Book of Waves, with Dr. Nicole Labruto joining in conversation.
Join Bird in Hand and The Ivy Bookshop for an evening of scholarship made accessible, opening conversation around this truly innovative monography! In A Book of Waves Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet.
Drawing on ethnographic work with oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, Helmreich details how scientists at sea and in the lab apprehend waves’ materiality through abstractions, seeking to capture in technical language these avatars of nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal. For researchers and their publics, the meanings of waves also reflect visions of the ocean as an environmental infrastructure fundamental to trade, travel, warfare, humanitarian rescue, recreation, and managing sea level rise. Interleaving ethnographic chapters with reflections on waves in mythology, surf culture, feminist theory, film, Indigenous Pacific activisms, Black Atlantic history, cosmology, and more, Helmreich demonstrates how waves mark out the wakes and breaks of social histories and futures.
Stefan Helmreich is Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, and Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World.
Nicole Labruto is an assistant research professor in the Department of Anthropology. She received her BA in Anthropology and Philosophy from Mount Holyoke College, her MA in Cultural Anthropology from the New School for Social Research, and her PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during which she was a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. She is also the recipient of fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the Fulbright Foundation. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and an Anthropologist-in-Residence at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She is a member of the Curatorial Circle of the Ecological Design Collective.