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Stop by the Global Hub to contribute to our poster on how you will celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day!

This is a fundraiser for Casa San Jose a Latine run and Latine supporting organization.

What is the relationship between everyday human culture and the global realities of anthropogenic climate change? My current book project, “Fueling Tokyo: Japan in the Age of Global Energy,” takes up this problem, knitting together histories of people, resources, technologies, and infrastructures to help us better understand the cultural connections that have fueled the Anthropocene in Japan. The country is the world’s third-largest economy; it imports 95% of its primary energy. Japan built an empire in pursuit of energy: labor and food calories, coal, hydroelectric sites, and oil. The story of Japanese modernization is one of almost unrelenting growth in energy consumption. Japan’s energy history is a history of energy accretions, each form layering over the top of what came before, reshaping the horizons of human agency in the process. The advent of hydroelectricity did not lead to a reduction in demand for coal. Coal consumption increased for the next fifty years (and is growing again), with only one exceptional decline: the final, lethal frenzy of the Japanese Empire’s collapse from 1943-1946. The rise of coal did not reduce demand for physical labor. In a well-known pattern, steam amplified demands on bodies by changing patterns of human and non-human labor. Using Japan’s peculiar case—an immense archipelagic economy utterly dependent on overseas sources of energy—I will explore the relationship between cultural history and climate history by tracing the specific movements of energy through the infrastructures that have come to define modernity in a country often held up as a technological leader.

Ian J. Miller is a cultural historian of Japan with a particular specialization in environmental history. He teaches in the Harvard Department of History and holds affiliate appointments in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and History of Science. He is the author of The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (2013), co-editor of Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power (2013), and co-editor of the forthcoming Oceanic Japan: The Archipelago in Global and Pacific History. He is also Faculty Dean of Cabot House at Harvard.

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Join Brazil Nuts for their weekly Portuguese conversation hour at all levels!

Hostile Terrain 94 Pittsburgh is hosting an event to commemorate the 3,200+ migrant lives lost at the U.S. Southern border due to hostile immigration policies. Join us to honor these lives and explore shared and cross-cutting issues of exploitation that shape both border violence and dispossession of Indigenous groups. Fill out toe-tags to help honor each individual migrant who lost their life attempting to cross the Sonoran desert from Mexico to the United States. Learn from experts Dr. Josue Lopez, Assistant Professor of Decoloniality at the University of Pittsburgh, and listen to musical guest Mike Simms, who is an Indigenous musician and part of the local drum group Thunder Nation, which performs and shared Indigenous powwow music across the United States. Takeaway snacks and beverages provided!

Join members of the French Club to and have casual conversation in French! All levels welcome.