Lecture Information
Time: 10:00 AM, April 7, 2026
Venue: Large Conference Room, School of Humanities
Speaker: Professor Joanna Page (University of Cambridge)
Host: Professor Jiang Yuqin (Shenzhen University)
Abstract: Science fiction studies typically focus on literature and cinema, but what happens when its narrative strategies and epistemological methods are adopted by visual artists? This lecture explores how contemporary Latin American artists employ various strategies of science fiction—including cognitive estrangement, speculative biology, posthumanism, world-building, and cross-species encounter—to develop their artistic practices. In their works, these artists borrow and transform forms and methods commonly associated with the production of scientific knowledge, such as classification systems, taxidermy, model-making, and prototype experimentation. In doing so, they interrogate how scientific authority is constructed, what it obscures or erases, and whether scientific knowledge can be reimagined in more plural and diverse ways. The lecture will focus on the works of artists such as Tomás Saraceno, Gilberto Esparza, Joaquín Fargas, Walmor Corrêa, and the art collective Interspecifics, exploring how speculative aesthetics are used to reconfigure the relationships between humans, technology, and non-human life. Interpreting contemporary Latin American art through a science fiction framework reveals the potential of speculative aesthetics as a form of decolonial environmental thought, opening up new understandings and imaginative pathways for planetary futures in the context of ecological crisis.
Speaker Biography
Joanna Page is Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Centre of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at Cambridge. In 2025, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). Her research interests focus primarily on the relationship between science and culture in the Latin American context, while also broadly engaging with issues such as memory, modernity, capitalism, posthumanism, new materialism, decolonial theory, ecology, and environmental thought. Her research has been funded by the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
Major publications:
Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Duke University Press, 2009)
Creativity and Science in Contemporary Argentine Literature (University of Calgary Press, 2014)
Science Fiction in Argentina (University of Michigan Press, 2016)
Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America (co-authored with Ed King, UCL Press, 2017)
Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art (UCL Press, 2021)
Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art (Open Book Publishers, 2023)
Host Biography
Jiang Yuqin, Ph.D., Professor at the School of Humanities, Shenzhen University; Vice Dean of the Jao Tsung-I Academy of Culture; Deputy Director of the Institute of Comparative Literature and Comparative Culture; Director of the Digital Humanities Research Center, School of Humanities; Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge; Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto. Her academic affiliations include: Member of the Council of the Chinese Comparative Literature Association; Vice Chair of the World Literature and Literary Theory Committee of the Chinese Comparative Literature Association; Standing Member of the Foreign Literature Committee of the Chinese Higher Education Society; Standing Member of the Chinese Comparative Literature Teaching Branch; and Member of the Teaching Branch of the Chinese Foreign Literature Association. She has published over 60 papers in domestic and international journals indexed by A&HCI, SSCI, CSSCI, etc., authored 2 monographs, edited 4 collections, and led multiple national and provincial/ministerial research projects. Her main research interests include science fiction literature and cultural theory.
Professor Joanna Page;s visit is supported by the NJU International Fellowship Initiative of Nanjing University. This lecture at Shenzhen University is supported by the Social Science Department of Shenzhen University and the Digital Humanities Research Center of the School of Humanities, Shenzhen University.
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