Date: Monday, March 30, 2026
Time: 12:30 – 2 pm
Location: PCN 2012, 6445 University Blvd
Speaker: Prof. Sadiah Qureshi, Visiting Scholar
RSVP: https://ubc.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6nSdNIjp2wnfJsy Thank you for your interest, the event is now full.
Description:
Once regarded as a theologically suspect idea, modern naturalists established the notion of extinction as a providential natural law that governed all life amid the French Revolution. While the first discussions of extinction as a natural law concerned historic animal extinctions, new ideas about loss were quickly extended to colonized peoples across the world. This talk explores how the political processes of colonization, conquest, and extermination were routinely conflated, and recast, as the natural extinction of ‘doomed races’. In particular, it traces how scientists tried to salvage the presumed remnants of colonized peoples and the legacies of such practices for museums and debates about Indigenous rights all over the world.
Biography:
Prof. Sadiah Qureshi holds a Chair in Modern British History at the University of Manchester. Her latest book Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction (Allen Lane, 2025) explores the entangled histories of extinction, empire, and genocide in the making of the modern world. She cannot bear the thought of living in a world without birdsong, trees, or tigers.
RSVP: https://ubc.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6nSdNIjp2wnfJsy Thank you for your interest, the event is now full.
Another event with Prof. Sadiah Qureshi on Tuesday, March 31st 2026:
https://edst.educ.ubc.ca/events/event/extinction-as-a-political-choice-in-the-anthropocene/