Energy and its limits shape our lives, connecting artistic and technological innovations, local communities and oppressive structures of power, political activism and affective fatigue, histories of environmental change and societal collapse, and the origin of life and entropic fate of the universe. This theme will bring together the arts, humanities, and social and natural sciences to investigate the space between energy and exhaustion as a metaphorical realm and lived reality. Together we will explore the endless potentiality of energy and limiting effects of exhaustion as they impact aesthetic innovation, literary imagination, political anxieties, environmental limits, and activist movements—all touching upon our shared past, current political realities, and collective futures.

Energy /Exhaustion Courses
In multiple disciplines across the curriculum, courses foster inquiry into the rich intellectual possibilities raised by the theme. Energy/Exhaustion resonates in the relationship between art and activism, radical imaginations as a strategy for black survival and resistance, ethnographies of climate change, an examination of the links between climate change and infectious diseases, an analysis of the chemistry of earth’s finite resources, environmental justice in China, literary responses to migration and exile, stories of crisis and resilience prompted by climate change, the quest for freedom in Early Modern France, fictional utopias, the philosophical underpinnings of radical ecologies, attempts to transform Russian society through film, biblical prophecy and apocalypse, the struggle for human rights in Latin America, conflict and combat in Shakespeare, the intersection of museums and performance, the literature of poverty and homelessness, and many more!
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Celebrating the pivotal role of the arts and humanities in the intellectural life of the College and the community.
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