Dipesh Chakrabarty, Christine Laquet, Jennifer Pitts, & Zachary Cahill on the Climate Crisis

Against the backdrop of Nina Chanel Abney's Threshold exhibition Between Us,Zachary Cahill, Director of Programs and Fellowships at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, moderates a discussion between the 2026-2027 Gray Fellows. Informed by their ongoing collaborative project combining historical inquiry, political theory, and performance, the panelists will discuss how we might move forward in the face of climate change. How do we teach, work, and create when the planet itself faces an unstable future? How do we communicate across generations that will experience the crisis differently? In collaboration with the Gray Center.Dipesh Chakrabarty was born in 1948 in Calcutta, India. He holds a bachelor's degree in Physics from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, a postgraduate degree in Management from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta, and a Ph.D. in History from the Australian National University in Canberra. Recognized for his influence in postcolonial studies and criticism of Eurocentrism, Chakrabarty is one of the founders of the Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Studies editorial boards, as well as a consulting editor for the journal Critical Inquiry and a member of the editorial board of the American Historical Review and Public Culture. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004, and an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2006. In 2010, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of London, in 2011, by the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and in 2022 by the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He also received the Distinguished Alumnus award from the Indian Institute of Management in 2011. In 2014, he received the Toynbee Prize in recognition of his contributions to global history. In 2019, he was again awarded the Tagore Memorial Prize, given by the Government of West Bengal, India. Chakrabarty also served as a member of the Council of Experts in Non-Western Art for the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and was part of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Center for Global Cooperation Research in Bonn and Essen from 2012 to 2015. Between 2018 and 2022, he was associated with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. In 2023, he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Additionally, he has been a visiting professor and researcher at institutions such as the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, the University of California, Berkeley, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, and Princeton University. He has been an honorary professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris since 2021 and is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.  Christine Laquet is a French visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice, informed by ecofeminist perspectives, explores environmental change, speculative thinking, and embodied forms of knowledge. Working across installation, performance, film, photography, and painting, she develops projects through encounters with scientists, research institutions, and more-than-human worlds. Her practice has included scientific expeditions at sea and residencies in research laboratories, engaging subjects ranging from marine ecosystems and microbial life to meteorites, endangered plants, and the return of wolves in collaboration with a naturalist. Her work is structured around three interconnected modes of engagement—BIO, GEO, and EXO—which explore relationships between living organisms, geological matter, and forms of estrangement that open up unfamiliar ways of seeing and relating. Laquet often creates immersive and site-responsive situations where observation, material experimentation, intuition, and speculation intersect. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Musée d'arts de Nantes, FRAC Pays de la Loire, Fondation Louis Vuitton, PyeongChang Biennale, Flux Factory, Pioneer Works, and MAMAM in Recife. Born in Lyon in 1975, she lives and works in Nantes, France.  Jennifer Pitts is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor in the departments of Political Science and the Committee on Social Thought, and chair of Political Science. She is a political theorist whose research interests lie in the fields of modern political and international thought, particularly the histories of empire and slavery, international law, and debates over global justice. She received her PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2000 and was an assistant professor at Yale and Princeton before coming to the University of Chicago in 2007. She is an editor of the Cambridge University Press series Ideas in Context. At the University of Chicago, she is a fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT), and a member of the faculty boards of the France Chicago Center and the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. She has recently published articles on eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism and on the antislavery thought of Nicolas de Condorcet, Sophie de Grouchy, and the Afro-British thinker Ottobah Cugoano and continues to work on cosmopolitanism and antislavery in the revolutionary period. She spoke about political theory and planetary history at the Institute for Historical Research in London in November 2025.  Zachary Cahill is an artist and Director of Programs and Fellowships at the University of Chicago's Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, where he also serves at the editor-in-chief of the journal Portable Gray published twice a year by the University of Chicago Press. Cahill has exhibited work in the Smart's Threshold series and in 2017 co-curated, Revolution Every Day, with the late UChicago Professor Robert Bird and Northwestern University's Art History Professor Christina Kaier. In 2006, Zachary Cahill received a special commendation for Guard of the Year at the Smart Museum of Art.