HMEI Faculty Seminar: “The Raven and the Sea”

Sarah Rivett, professor of English and American studies, will present “The Raven and the Sea” in Guyot Hall, Room 10, and online via Zoom. Rivett is the final speaker in the fall 2024 HMEI Faculty Seminar Series.

Early ornithology organized itself around a binary of land birds and sea birds. This talk follows the journey of one bird in particular, the raven who is relegated to barren patches of land. In contrast, in Northwestern Pacific Indigenous traditions, ravens move seamlessly through intertidal zones characterized by the porous boundary of land and sea. The figure of the raven in the Indigenous Pacific West exposes the epistemological limits of European and Anglo-American ornithology to comprehend intertidal ecologies, which are by definition liminal, malleable, impermanent and therefore resistant to Western-colonial categories of knowledge.

This seminar is free and open to the public. Lunch will be available in the Guyot Atrium at noon. All attendees can register here in advance to attend this event via Zoom livestream.

Image courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum.