Cymene Howe, the final guest of the Winter 2026 HistCon Research Colloquium will be joining us next week to give her talk “Elemental Encounters: how water, ice and fire + earth, spin and chemicals become us”.

From chemical relations to the sweep of stormfronts, the elements render a series of sensory, scientific and semiotic coordinates that reveal material intimacies. The classical forms of western philosophy (earth, air, fire, water) and the periodic table of chemical elements operate as tools of categorization. Eastern elemental philosophies and the many Indigenous elemental entities of world-making, in their multiple capacities, represent forces of encounter, interaction and transformation. In this discussion, I explore the analytic possibilities afforded through an engagement with elemental forms and I offer a preliminary set of coordinates to evaluate socioenvironmental phenomena through ethnographic engagement with elemental dispositions. Drawing from Alaimo and Starosielski’s conviction that the elements represent ‘lively forces that shape culture, politics, and communication,’ I consider how human and nonhuman encounters through (and with) the elements can help us surface both the punctuations and the cadences of our times and how the elements themselves, when heard as ethnographic interlocutors, have much to tell us about our place in the world.

This event is in-person with a virtual option to join available. Register above to join virtually.

Cymene Howe is Professor of Anthropology and Co-Founder of the STS Program at Rice University. Her most recent books include Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene; Anthropocene Unseen; Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Contemporary Theory. She has conducted field research in Nicaragua and Mexico, Iceland and Greenland, the U.S. and South Africa and has been awarded The Berlin Prize for Transatlantic Dialogue in the Arts, Humanities, and Public Policy as well as a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residential Fellowship. Her current research focuses on the social impacts of glacier loss and sea level rise in coastal communities globally and she has co-created many public-facing events and art installations to raise climate awareness including the Okjökull Memorial (Iceland, 2019). She is currently at work on a book entitled The Elemental Turn.

This event is part of the 2026 Winter Research Colloquium Series.