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While decades ago histories of Chicago predictably opened with the arrival of French colonists Marquette and Joliet, today’s popular accounts are more likely to begin with the last Ice Age. Historical accounts, educational displays, tourist brochures, media articles, county and city park signage and monument plaques invite us to imagine the landscape of Chicago as shaped 20,000 years ago, by the retreating Laurentide Ice sheet. More and more accounts also ask us to imagine how this sheet of ice is now vanishing due to global warming. When and how did glacial science appear as an origin narrative in Chicago? Wrapped up in imperial myths of conquest, progress and civilization, glacial histories are not neutral science. Rather, by investigating how knowledge about glaciers was produced, circulated, taught and mobilized, we will trace the political history of glaciers as a distinctly colonial imagining. How does this shape our understanding of our past, present and possible?

Two sessions. $120/$108.

Led by Rozalinda Borcila.

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Rozalinda Borcila is a Romanian an independent artist, writer and activist, and former Associate Professor of Art at the University of South Florida. She received the Arthur and Lila Weinberg Fellowship from the Newberry Library in Spring 2021. She teaches in libraries, art museums and activist spaces.