Please save the date for our first Nonfiction Reading event this fall: this Wednesday, September 16 at 6:00 PM in Tivoli 640 (Zenith Room).
We’re bringing in Megan Poole from the University of Texas at Austin; she’ll talk about and read from her book, Listening to Beauty (Chicago, 2025) -- it’s a narrative exploration of how biologists’ encounters with natural beauty orient scientific discovery.
Here’s Poole’s summary of her book:
Our attempts to understand the world are always more than simply rational. Our bodies learn through lived experience, our natural environments challenge what we think we know, and we take lessons from our nonhuman kin. Even scientists, often considered paragons of rationality, frequently describe their findings in the language of beauty. So, in this book, I argue: beauty is integral to how scientific research works.
Drawing on interviews with leading biologists, I explore what happens when scientists set aside objectivity and listen for beauty around them. The wonder we feel at the plumage of birds, the melodies of whales, or the caretaking of elephants may not help us (on its own) to isolate a given fact, but such encounters may teach us to open ourselves to a different way of knowing entirely. Through stories about researchers’ encounters with wonder, Listening to Beauty reveals how scientific discovery happens sometimes unsystematically, sometimes incoherently, often beautifully.
We hope to see you there and hope that you will encourage your students to attend as well -- it’ll be an engaging talk and very much geared toward a multidisciplinary audience.
