Claire Farago: Visiting Art History Scholar Lecture

Thinking Nonviolence through Art

Ecology and the Phantasmagoria of Human Exceptionalism

The main focus of Farago's current work concerns the historical relationship between European assumptions about art and society and the degradation of the environment on a global scale. The imperially embedded biopolitics that legitimize resource extraction trace back to Aristotle's doctrine of human exceptionalism, weaponized in the sixteenth century to classify entire societies by their supposed degrees of humanness based on their arts broadly defined (techne). This talk will examine how these epistemological structures became entangled with the extractive practices of what historical geographer Jason W. Moore calls the Capitalocene. The paper moves from early modern Aristotelian debates over Amerindian rationality, through climate theory's role in founding racial science and philosophical aesthetics, to conclude with Indigenous artists and activists whose anti-imperialist coalitions offer strategies for confronting environmental collapse and building sustainable, multilateral futures.

Claire Farago, Professor Emerita at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been committed to interdisciplinary, globally relevant scholarship that is critically engaged with European intellectual traditions throughout her career spanning nearly four decades. Her most recent publications include the monograph, Writing Borderless Histories of Art: Human Exceptionalism and the Climate Crisis, Five Fugues on the Future of the Past (Routledge, 2025); the co-edited anthology, Transcultural Histories of Art and Artisanal Epistemologies: Knowledge to Be Made (Routledge, 2025); and a special issue of the international e-journal Arts, entitled "Rethinking Art History and Culture: Defining an Ecological Approach” (2026).