Organized alongside the exhibition Flight Paths, the event brings together birds, their presence in the Ancient World, and their periled future. The two scholars, environmental humanist Subhankar Banerjee and archeologist Cristiana Franco will address, in their respective presentations, the presence of birds. Banerjee’s talk will be anchored in Tórshavn, Faroe Island, and begin in 1806, and from there it will emanate out to several other places around the world in Europe, Asia and the Americas, spanning three centuries. It highlights resistance to further destruction, and community-led efforts of ecological restoration and cultural renewal—all of which help guide and shape more-just public policy from local to global scales. Franco's presentation will focus on the circulation and diffusion of the Indian parakeet in the ancient Mediterranean, addressing chronological and geographical issues but also the effects of this introduction in terms of animal welfare and relationships with native talking birds.  

Subhankar Banerjee is a photographer, writer, curator, and environmental humanities scholar. His practice, scholarly work, and public efforts have engaged with three borderlands ecologies to address the entangled biodiversity and climate crises and Indigenous rights: the arctic of US-Canada; the desert of US-Mexico; and the mangrove of India-Bangladesh. Subhankar is a professor of art and the founding director of the Center for Environmental Arts & Humanities at the University of New Mexico. He is a co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2023), and is the editor of the forthcoming expansive anthology Coexistence: BioDiversity in New Mexico (UNM Press, 2027). His photographs are held in a number of collections, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Subhankar Banerjee is the 2026 Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography at the American Academy in Rome.

Cristiana Franco is professor of Classical Philology at the University for Foreigners of Siena. Most of her scholarship has been devoted to interactions with non-human animals in ancient Greek and Roman societies. She is the author of Shameless. The Canine and the Feminine in Ancient Greece (Oakland, 2014) and Il mito di Circe (Torino 2010; French transl. Le mythe de Circé, Paris 2013) and co-editor of Zoomathia. Learning about Animals in Ancient and Medieval Cultures (Siena, 2023). Taking an anthrozoological approach to the ancient evidence, her research ranges from the role played by animals in the naturalization of gender and morals, to the influence of human-animal relationships on animal imagery in literature and myth, to the vocabulary of human-animal interactions in ancient languages. She leads the working group for the implementation of the project "Proteus. An interpretive database of the Greek and Roman mythical lore”.

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