In this lecture, RICH fellow Christopher Heuer will talk about how “cold” has been understood not only as a physical condition but as a cultural and imaginative force, shaping art, literature and social structures.
Abstract
First-world academia’s broader embrace of environmental humanities in the face of a dying earth has succeeded in novel transdisciplinary collaborations – particularly when engaging front-line regions for climate disaster - like the far North. Recent research initiatives (MIT, Rochester) have reminded us that Northern cold, for example, is not just a physical presence or a data set, but a cultural force affecting power, race, gender,colonial, and economic structures, among others. And cold continues to sustain as a mode of aesthetic production for artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, even cartoonists both local and international; it haunts literature and visual culture as subject, metaphor, and experience, often the most inscrutable bellwether of climate catastrophe present and forthcoming.
While the long history of such phenomena is far from unstudied, a presentism, even a technicity, often persists in the way cold is examined in the humanities. Numerous scholars of antiquity and the early modern are attempting to correct this, of course, and specifically, it is perhaps “thermal turn” in climate studies (Brown and Porath, Petcu, Saß, Zorach, for example), that has suggested a specifically apt counter to the read of extreme temperatures as mere environmental metric. The lived, embodied imaginative of cold has its own history, one different from simple ice and snow. This paper turns to some unexpected cases of writing and art from the sixteenth century through today, texts and objects that engage older modes of describing and inhabiting cold and the senses, cold not just measured but lived, interpreted, and imagined.
About the speaker
Christopher P. Heuer is Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Rochester, New York, where he teaches in the Program in Environmental Humanities. The recipient of Humboldt, DAAD, and Harvard fellowships, he was Kress Fellow at the Kunsthistorisch Instituut Leiden as a writer on early modern culture. His two most recent books are Into The White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image (Princeton/Zone 2019), and Hell’s Magnet: Underworlds of Early Modern Art (Pennsylvania State Press, forthcoming 2027). His current research, which he pursed as a senior fellow at the Getty Research Institute in 2025-6, deals with land art and waste.
