Join Dr. John Durham Peters, Professor of Film and Media Studies at Yale University,for a public talk entitled entitled “How the Modern World Lost Interest in the Weather: A Media History” at Reed University in Portland on Monday March 18th at 4:30 P.M. The talk will be in Eliot 314 on Reed’s Campus. The address is 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR 97202.

Description: On its face, weather sounds like the most banal and mundane thing possible. When people talk about the weather, we usually take that as a sign of nothing to talk about. This talk aims to show that the accusation that talking about the weather is intellectually empty is hardly the case in the age of climate change, and even dangerous. Reading the skies is one paradigm case of human-nature interaction, and studying weather can stand in as part for whole as an inquiry into the environments humans have made or unmade. The history of modern weather forecasting is also a history of the militarization of the sky and oceans, and is co-extensive with the history of modern telecommunications and computation.