Environmental Humanities Seminar with Pujita Guha
Date and Time
Location
Shade and the Capture of Light
Speaker: Pujita Guha, 2025-26 MHC Postdoctoral Fellow
Respondent: Caren Irr
Pujita Guha is an artist, curator, and scholar whose research interests hover around environmental humanities, media studies, science and technology studies, and Global Indigenous studies. She received her PhD in Film and Media Studies from the University of California Santa Barbara. Her current book project, Forested Media: Indigenous Lifeworlds in Upland Asia looks at how, in the post-Cold War era (1990s-present), Indigenous communities in the region claim the sovereignty of forests through artistic, popular, and scientific media. Situating her work in upland Asia (between India’s northeast, contiguous Southeast Asia and Southwest China), she offers a ground-up and sensory account of Indigenous life. The project fundamentally argues that Indigenous relations to the forest are not just cosmological and theological, but also technical and practical in building everyday non-extractive, non-capitalist life in the forest.
As an artist and curator, from 2018-2023, Guha co-founded and co-directed the artistic and research platform, The Forest Curriculum, and from 2023-June 2025, Hosting Lands, a decentralized land and ecological curatorial project in Denmark. Her curatorial and academic research has been funded by grants from the UCSB Chancellor’s Fellowship, BikubenFonden Denmark, Arts Council Australia, and Sharjah Art Foundation amongst others. She has also published in Cultural Critique, Cultural Politics, ACT Taiwan, E-flux, and Artforum, and has contributed to several other edited volumes, artistic projects, and exhibition catalogs.
Caren Irr is Kevy and Hortense Kaiserman Professor in the Humanities and Head of the Humanities Division at Brandeis University. Her research interests include theory, film and media studies, contemporaneity, environmental humanities, and the novel.
Registration is required for this event.
About the Series
The Mahindra Humanities Center presents an Environmental Humanities seminar series with our 2025-26 postdoctoral fellows.