'The Humanities in Spaaaace!' at the DePaul Humanities Center

I've been invited to contribute to an event about Mars and the Humanities at the DePaul Humanities Center in Chicago on the 17th October 2016. Here's the poster:

What a evening! Beginning with a screening of The Martian, followed by talks and music by The Bach & Beethoven Ensemble, this promises to be a memorable trip. I'll be joining Rachel Binx, a data visualiser working with JPL to develop software for telemetry, and K. Maria D. Lane, based at the University of New Mexico's Department of Geography. Her 2010 book was Geographies of Mars (University of Chicago Press).

This evening is part of a yearlong series, with each event dedicated to a different planet or planetary feature. Future evenings in the series have as their subjects 'Orbits' and 'The Moon' - Geoffrey A. Landis, a scientist working at NASA's John Glenn Research Center and the author of several science fiction short stories, is participating in the latter.

These events are organised by the center's director, H. Peter Steeves. I've come across some of his own work on the philosophy of animal others and on phenomenology while conducting research during my postdoctoral project on animal discourse and corpus linguistics (digital humanities).

After the event....

There is now a video of the evening's musical performances and talks, which you can view at the DePaul Humanities Center's YouTube page, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIm_VsixbhY.

The evening was as enjoyable as I had anticipated, and H. Peter Steeves' hospitality and insight are impressive. If you're in the Chicago area, I would highly recommend attending one of these events. The talks are also posted on the DePaul Humanties Center's YouTube page, for those not in the locale.