Evander Price

Evander Price is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Harvard University. His dissertation research proposes a new category of monumentality, the “future monument.” Unlike most monuments, which ask audiences to remember the past, future monuments are built explicitly to manifest an imagination of the future. The dissertation explores three different monuments spanning the twentieth century, specifically the 1939 World’s Fair, the NASA Voyager Golden Record, and the 10,000 Year Clock of the Long Now Foundation. These temporally strange monuments offer perspective on changing American cultural values and anxieties across the century, as well as both eco- and chronocritical insight. They show how imagined futures, even if never realized, still pressure the present. He hopes to help shape the larger emerging field of time studies and show the many ways that assumptions and metaphors of time tremendously impact how people treat each other and the world around them. The future isn’t what it used to be.