Salar Maneni, associate professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, will be leading a graduate student reading group on the theme of "war and ecology." Participants will read Mameni's book Terracene in connection with Munira Khayyat's book A Landscape of War and a short essay by the artist Jumanna Manna titled "Where Nature ends and Settlements Begin."

Registration deadline is 5 p.m. Monday, March 16 and is limited to first come, first served. Materials and lunch will be provided to registered participants.

Salar Mameni is an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab/Muslim world with an interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia. Mameni is the author of Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke, 2023), which considers the emergence of the Anthropocene as a new geological era in relation to the concurrent declaration of the War on Terror in the early 2000s. Playing on the words “terror” and “terra,” Mameni proposes the term “Terracene” in order to think of the planetary in conjunction with ongoing militarization of transnational regions under terror. The book engages contemporary art and aesthetic productions, paying particular attention to artists navigating the geopolitics of petrocultures and climate change.