Organized alongside the exhibition Flight Paths, this event, in partnership with the Berggruen Institute’s Future Humans initiative, explores the movement of birds across cities, climates, and time—and what their flight paths reveal about the fragile ecologies we inhabit.

Part of Future Wunderkammer, a recurring collaboration between the American Academy in Rome and the Berggruen Institute’s Future Humans program, the series, co-hosted by Claire Isabel Webb (Associate Director, Programs, Berggruen Institute) and Ilaria Puri Purini (Andrew Heiskell Arts Director, American Academy in Rome) invites a leading thinker each year to respond to the Academy’s exhibition program through a philosophical lens—bridging ecology, material culture, and speculative imagination.

This year, Stacy Alaimo, the Moore Professor in English and Core Faculty in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon will be featured. Her research focuses on environmental theory, science studies, literary and cultural studies, and the blue (oceanic) humanities. Her concept of “transcorporeality” has been quite influential and cited across many fields. She has published four books, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space; Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, which won the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment book award; Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times; and The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep Sea Life. She has edited two books, Material Feminisms and Gender: Matter, edited a special volume of Configurations on Science Studies and the Blue Humanities and she co-edits the Elements series at Duke University Press. Her work has been featured in several podcasts, widely reprinted and translated into at least 13 languages; it has inspired art exhibitions, artworks, architecture, a Portuguese play, and a Greek queer zine. Her book, Exposed, was translated into Italian as Allo Scoperto, Politiche e Piaceri Ambientali in Epoche Posthumane (Mimesis Press, 2024).

On this occasion, the exhibition Flight Paths will be open from 5pm to 8pm.