Eva Horn is professor of modern German literature and cultural history at the University of Vienna and the founding director of the Vienna Anthropocene Network. She is the Max Kade Visiting Professor in UC Berkeley's Department of German in Fall 2024.

The modern definition of climate as “average weather” has erased an age-old sensorium that cultures had towards their surroundings, most specifically the air — be it hot or cold, clean or miasmatic. In her talk, Horn addresses some of the historical aspects of this ancient, “elemental” understanding of air and climate. Tracing the ways in which air has been forgotten in the modern age, she argues for a renewed attention to, and nuanced understanding of, the atmosphere(s) that surround us. 

Horn's books include The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age (2018), which offers a pathbreaking critique of the modern fascination with disaster as a symptom of our relationship to the future. Analyzing the catastrophic imaginary from its cultural and historical roots in Romanticism and the figure of the Last Man, through the narratives of climatic cataclysm and the Cold War’s apocalyptic sublime, to the contemporary popularity of disaster fiction and end-of-the-world blockbusters, Horn argues that apocalypse always haunts the modern idea of a future that can be anticipated and planned. What makes today’s obsession different from that of previous epochs, she asserts, is the sense of a “catastrophe without event,” a stealthily creeping process of disintegration.

Horn's talk is held in conjunction with the Townsend Center's Collaborative Research Seminar on “Rethinking Futures." The Fall 2024 seminar enables a group of faculty members and graduate students to collaboratively explore "the future" cross-culturally and across time, especially in light of the many existential threats now facing humanity — including environmental crisis, war, and democracy's sudden fragility.