“Haunted Nature” Lecture October 14

Join us in Macy 110 at 4:00 pm

Dr. Hillary Kaell (McGill University) speaks in Macy 110 at 4:00pm on “Haunted Nature: Spirit and Power in a Public Garden.”

The Elizabethan Garden in Manteo, NC (pictured here) was designed in the mid-twentieth century as a living memorial for sixteenth-century English settlers who died on Roanoke Island, North Carolina. Today, the site is haunted by many kinds of ghosts: long-lost colonists and recently deceased relatives, absent Indigenous and Black people, and erosion-related land loss. This talk takes audience members on a tour of the Garden and its recent past to propose “the ecological gothic” as a rubric for analyzing complex attachments in places that are defined by historical memory and rapid ecological change. More broadly, it considers human-spirit relations as a factor in an emerging cross-disciplinary focus on how climate change is experienced, including in deeply emotional ways.

Hillary Kaell is associate professor in Anthropology and Religious Studies at McGill University, where she also holds a William Dawson Chair and directs a multiyear collaboration between scholars and artists called TERA (technology/ecology/religion/art). Her current project focuses on the relationship between humans, other species, and spirits on the Outer Banks barrier islands of North Carolina.