The Climate & Colonialism Working Group

The Climate & Colonialism working group consists of a core set of collaborators who will support and contribute to developing different interdisciplinary strands of the research project over the next three years.

Debjani Bhattacharrya

Debjani Bhattacharyya holds the Chair for the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zürich and is a non-resident fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018) which won the 2019 honourable mention for the best book in urban history. Currently she is writing a long history of how marine insurance market’s risk apprehensions shaped weather knowledge and a derivatives market in climate futures in the Indian Ocean region.

Rachael Z. DeLue

Rachael Z. DeLue is a professor of art history and American studies at Princeton University. She studies art and visual culture in Europe and the Americas in the modern period from a transatlantic and transcultural perspective. She has affiliate appointments in Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute, Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, and Program in Media and Modernity. Her work explores intersections between art and science and the significance of visual expression within the history and theory of knowledge in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her research also considers the formation of the United States as a contested geography, identity and idea.

Astrida Neimanis

Astrida Neimanis (she/they) is associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at UBC Okanagan, on unceded Syilx territorities in Kelowna, BC, Canada. Often in collaboration with artists, scientists, writers and other communities, their research explores human relationships to water, weather and climate change from feminist, queer, anticolonial, antiracist and disability justice perspectives. They are Director of the FEELed Lab and founding member of The Weathering Collective. Notable publications include Bodies of Water: Feminist Posthuman Phenomenology and Hydrofeminism: Or, on How to Become a Body of Water.

Mark Sealy and Bindi Vora of Autograph

Autograph is a London-based non-profit arts charity that explores issues of identity, representation, human rights and social justice through photography.

Dr Mark Sealy OBE is Executive Director of Autograph (1991–) and Professor, Photography, Rights and Representation at University Arts London – London College of Communication. Mark is interested in the relationship between art, photography and social change, identity politics, race and human rights. He has written for many of the world’s leading photographic journals, produced numerous artist publications, curated exhibitions, and commissioned photographers and filmmakers worldwide. Lawrence & Wishart have published his more recent critical writings on photography. These titles include Photography: Race, Rights and Representation, published 2022 and Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time, published 2019.

Bindi Vora is a British-Indian artist working with expanded photography, associate lecturer at London College of Communication and curator at Autograph. Since joining Autograph, she has curated Eric Gyamfi (2023), Poulomi Basu: Fireflies (2022), co-curated Sasha Huber: You Name It (2022), Care I Contagion I Community – Self & Other (2021–2022); Lola Flash: [sur]passing and Maxine Walker: Untitled (both 2019) and contributed to a series of in-conversations with multidisciplinary artists include Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, Maryam Wahid, Tobi Alexandra Falade, David Uzochukwu amongst others. She has independently curated Poulomi Basu: Centralia for Recontres d’Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2020) and Let’s Go Through This Again (2018).

Tile caption: Photo by Lucy Parakhina from A River Ends as the Ocean: Walk the Tide Out, Aunty Rhonda Dixon Grovenor, Clare Britton, Astrida Neimanis, 2021.